Living in a country that’s becoming more and more obsessed with the end of the world can actually be pretty fascinating. There’s no shortage of television shows about “prepping” and it seems like more and more people are coming up with their own fantasies of what they’ll do or where they’ll go “when the shit hits the fan.” This is natural, right? Unhealthy, maybe, but natural. With health scares and terrorism flooding the airways, it’s hard to blame people for thinking about what the future will be like.
This idea is subtly touched on in Nathan Kemp’s poem, Our Doors Will No Longer Be For Knocking, published in H-NGM-N (like the game Hangman…get it?). Kemp’s poem feels almost post-apocalyptic, pushing us to “keep growing, keep growing”, a sort of mantra we’ll apparently need to cling to “once the world bottoms out / the inevitable flood / & the overgrowth that follows”. A bit unnerving, right? But this poem doesn’t necessarily feel all doom and gloom, and Kemp doesn’t seem to want us to be scared. If anything, it’s got more of a Buddhist or Native American vibe to it. A sort of back to the earth theme that keeps us all connected. Kemp says, “everything depends on / how we treat one another”. There’s certainly change, but not exactly death, and the prospect of growth is absolutely there. We are related through nature, and Our Doors Will No Longer Be For Knocking conveys that at the end saying, “we learn how / we are connected / to the moon”.
Although Kemp’s piece is a bit cryptic, it’s not an impossible read, and it feels accessible even if you don’t have a fifty-year supply of beans and bullets tucked away in your basement.
Check the full poem out at http://www.h-ngm-n.com/h_ngm_n-sixteen/nathan-kemp.html
[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’]http://minotaursspotlight.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Fran-Bio-Image.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]Francis Daulerio is a poet and teacher from the Philadelphia suburbs. His work has recently been published in The Fictioneer, Whiskey Island, The Stone Highway Review, and Written River. His first full collection of poetry will be released in April 2015 through the Unsolicited Press. More information can be found at www.FrancisDaulerio.com and @FDwrites. [/author_info] [/author]
