TIM SUERDMONDT
When the World Really Ends
No One Will Announce it
So relax. Let the emissaries of everything
bring what they want.
There will be the worst—war insists.
Yet the best will not be shy—love insists.
Prim and proper is fine, but keep allowing
the oddball to find its serene equations:
Look at the sun trying to put on pants
Look at the moon tying on a scarf
Look at the angel riding a skateboard
exactly like she dreamed,
her wings smudged, bent just as she prefers.
Tim Suermondt is the author of three full-length collections of poems: Trying To Help The
Elephant Man Dance (The Backwaters Press, 2007), Just Beautiful (New York Quarterly Books,
2010) and Election Night And The Five Satins (Glass Lyre Press, 2016). He has poems published
in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Ploughshares and Prairie Schooner. He lives in Cambridge
(MA) with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.