& When They Come for Me (Reprise)

I can’t give you my eye,
nor a kidney, nor a second

right now. We have to hustle
up the block like antelopes
cus all the buses are

colonists. All the signs
are chandeliers, light

stuck in shambles.
I’m eating earth—

worms watching
neighbors become stars,

Grannies becoming idols, parents
become strangers. Our childhoods
were sundials. Adulthood sundered & stabbed

for the Sabbath. Our nations are out,
our capitals are overrun with word-rot.

I’m photographing the apocalypse
while watching history through the mouth

of a shield. I’m from conifers
peeling potpourri for the arrivals

needing helipads. Summon oblivion & still
I give my heart to the panthers
to the Palestinians cracking open

a skull-warm winter, screaming back we’re all the I
in nation—even when we’re scheduled to die.

Copyright © 2024 by Golden. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 26, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“This poem is from a larger project of the same title, Reprise, which builds a continuous response to living in America from 2020 to today. This iteration in particular grapples with me witnessing the COVID-19 pandemic, Alzheimer’s, civil and world wars, genocides, death and death and death. The way I see and interact with the world will never be the same. And still, in the chaos of facing destruction, there’s a love to document, a family worth fighting for, a revolution worth freeing. Yes, we must die one day, and I hope we can still choose to live for one another.”
—Golden