Desistance Scenarios

Mid-April, with the bans unlifted.
One neighbor is setting cement blocks
atop the earth, while another climbs up
a ladder and onto the roof. Everyone is taking
this seemingly newfound time to attend to tasks
that otherwise go untended. Lawn mowers and
hedge trimmers fill small pockets of afternoon
with their sounds of industry. The insects
must be sprayed, crops harvested, non-
deliverable excesses poured into the earth
as rivers of milk. Is this how it was, all those
other times when the world was about to end? 
The smell of charred flesh coming out
of ovens. Horse stalls filled with people.
Hammers and scaffold parts falling
from a tower that would never reach the sky.
Pyramids in which kings, masons, and beetles 
were buried under an avalanche of stone.