Prophecy of a Monday

if the cotton crop fails
if the wheat crop fails

if Oklahomans wander forever
among the back lots of Hollywood

if the potato crops fail
if the corn crops fail

if the sun corrodes a copper
mirror our faces afloat

above a crib in Guadalajara where the ceiling fan
rends our voices

and the secret lives of aloe roots 
confess to a window in feathers of ice

then the bluebells yawning up in ruts
of mining roads will measure the border wall

in the serene apotheosis of their sepals

and one drop of my blood

will freeze in the eye
of an old fox, and one drop

from your eye thaw
to feed the iris bulbs

three beads from our lungs
inhaled by a prisoner

in the electric chair a queen
in a fairy tale a farmer

planting mines east of her field if
the gears of the clouds say yes

if ants flow up and down the funnels
of evolution

then time will prism into its possibles
and you’ll end up in a bar

in Alabama a cherry in your mouth
watching a hotel key

float toward you
or you’ll wake in a labyrinth

called Monday                called Your Life
called The Things You Prayed For

and your intricate decisions
will lead you out and deeper in

your mirrors dissolving in ghost water

and your indecisions will go on
subtracting numbers from the garden

and building houses in the air

Credit

Copyright © 2019 by Chad Sweeney. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 18, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“Time has been my lifelong obsession. To explore time and interconnectedness in a new way, I am writing a book in the future tense, a book of prophecies in one extended sentence, entitled ‘The Futures,’ which reimagines time and causality for the age of quantum physics. Rather than a linear destiny, these prophecies trace the future(s) as flowerings of accident and intersectionality, lived histories of the sacred mundane where individuals and their choices are swept up into larger patterns—war, poverty, the urgent flight of refugees from Syria, Yemen, Mexico, and Central America—with echoes of past exigencies such as the Oklahoma Dustbowl and the Irish Potato Famine.”
Chad Sweeney