Our fall/winter contest judge Stan Rubin was struck with the lyric qualities in Afrose Ahmed’s entry, “the world did end…we just didn’t notice.” He wrote in his comments: “A gorgeous piece of lyrical writing. The odd but wonderfully sustained angle of vision—post-apocalyptic, witty, and liminal all at once—establishes its own rhythm and deepens to revelation. The profusion of brilliantly evocative images seems to condense eons in a voice both eternal and earthly. The clever counterpoint couplets add a further dimension. A brief but indelible achievement, like an artistic fireworks show.”

the world did end…we just didn’t notice
by Afrose Ahmed

What was that like, to live in the afterlife? We built museums to house the rulebooks and manuals for the obsolete versions of ourselves. We grew our homes from bamboo and fed ourselves on family secrets. We stopped saying [NO] and we stopped saying [yes.] and we just said… Okay. All right, then. Of course. We spent more time with our ears pressed to the concrete and we let mating bugs crawl through us.

Blue shiny scarab beetle. Baby bat. Pigeon and peacock. Gray gecko. Hoopoe
and raven and nightingale. Mosquito. Eagle. Fly. Wild boar gored a deer.

They were all the same. Every time we opened our mouths, diamonds fell out until the sidewalks glittered, the animals wore encrusted furs and we went swimming in matter on the basis of regularity. The babies finally admitted that they didn’t want to eat their vegetables because they were fed by angels and there was an angel in the crystal the healer gave to you and this happened at least 5.7 times a day. Indigo children became indigo ancestors and we dipped their baby teeth in gold and inserted them into our own portable dashboard altars.

We saw the sounds under the speech. When we walked (instead of folding ourselves into
fetal positions aboard buses and trains and automobiles) our hips swayed and not clicked.

We climbed up so we could come back down to earth. We shot spaceships into our own personal orbits. We didn’t restrain our celestial bodies with underwire and spanx, we let them be improbable and in motion and recognized them for the live butterflies they were — impossible to pin down. Everyone saw everyone else’s demons, all pointed ears and smoking nostrils and split tongues, and we played frisbee with them in wooded fields. We picnicked there, ripped leaves off the trees, folded them into origami cranes and doves and mice and delicately plopped them into our mouths with chopsticks and a little dirt for spice. All the chairs fell into disuse

because no one could rest elevated off the earth anymore. Nobody
took sugar in their coffee anymore. No one took their coffee.

The woman in the lavender gypsy skirt and the broken teeth gave you a surprise smile. And you were not surprised that your entire body contorted into a grin. These days when people greeted themselves, each meeting of lip to cheek lasted an eon and still we lingered. We were constellations, we were connect the dots, we were moving, melting rorschachs. When the girl in the dress that wasn’t maroon and wasn’t fuchsia and wasn’t brown drifted past on the mustard bicycle, we all stopped what we were saying and let the cigarettes fall from our mouths in astonishment. When the punk princess sitting at the sidewalk café in Place Victor Hugo was watching and scribbling, scribbling and listening, and the crone smiled and said something in a tongue that couldn’t fit into the girl’s ear, she just reached out to the words under the words and laughed. Kept on keeping on. Because if the pens stopped flowing

that’s how the world stops turning and if the world stops turning, that’s how we
all start floating and we have done enough of that. Enough of leaving earth behind.

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Such densely image-packed prose moved me along and then ultimately plunged me deeper into a world that seemed beyond our world until the words journey me to the realization that today this is what living in our world is like. The last two lines served as a wakeup call to me about remaining grounded in nature, in spirituality, in whatever it takes to remain mindful and authentic. My feeling at the very end was one of thanks for the experience of seeing into what is too often just overlooked or somehow accepted.

Here is what Afrose Ahmed wrote about writing “the world did end… we just didn’t notice.”

It had been cooking unconsciously for years and also felt as if I channeled it one sunny afternoon at a Grenoble outdoor cafe during a solo free write. During the 2012 Mayan calendar brouhaha, I lived in Texas (where the idea of apocalypse felt all too real) and the question implicit in the title nagged at me. I even gave the title to a playlist but didn’t yet have the words for the actual piece.

It wasn’t until grief and the ensuing displacement had caused my own personal world to end that I found myself at this French cafe in 2014, writing. The piece popped out as a prose poem, close to the form in which it would stay for a year and a half. I was in love with it. I would read it over and over. I memorized it. It was the impetus to give my blog a proper domain name. And yet I had no ideas on how to revise it.

The piece followed me to Port Townsend, where I workshopped it, yet my lovely fellow writers had only positive feedback and no suggestions for edits. So it was a full 18 months after I first wrote it and posted it publicly and submitted it to journals, that I sent it to Sheila, determined to revise.

Sheila suggested that I cut out some throat clearing at the beginning. I recall largely following her recommendations, but perhaps keeping a few small things I was too attached to to cut. And in that freedom her suggestions gave me to play with the poem, I broke a few of the existing lines out into couplets, to emphasize them and create a different pace for the reader to stay engaged.

I will say that I felt I lost some of the beauty of the internal rhythm in the editing, which is entirely a reflection of my skills, and only means that I will likely continue to revise the piece even more, even as I continue to send it out for consideration by journals.

I feel that the poem is a horse and I am a rider — before she was a wild pony, and I could only ride passively and pray for my life. And then for a time I tried to dominate her. But now I feel we are in a symbiotic relationship and communicating with and trusting each other.

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What was your experience as you read this prose poem? Remember, it isn’t necessary to “understand” a poem to feel something deeply. Let us know what happened in you as you read.