POETRY: AYMAN ARIK KAZI

IT WON'T END WITH A BANG,

or a snip, or a crack, or a boom.
no book will end it.
no image will inspire action.
no action will stop the tirade.
no tirade will lull the crash,
or the boom,
or the crack,
or the snip…
before it’s over.

it won’t end with DEFCON 1,
but with muddied water guzzled down desperate throats
and mothers crying at shallow graves.
with winds whispering away whimpering cities,
and brothers packing mothers and sisters to safety.
it won’t end with the masses.
there will be no riots in the streets,
instead they will run blue
and be made seas gushing into coast.
it won’t end with a hero.
no, the hero will die of pneumonia,
or starve when the livestock have died from dysentery
and mildew has taken the plants.
we won’t be chased.
if we had been, we may have run.
instead, death will crawl at a sickly pace
and close the space between us.
it will end how it all started…
with water rushing shores,
earth cracking open,
and fire razing forests,
to make room for new inhabitants.
but not with a bang.

Ayman Arik Kazi is a Muslim, bisexual, Bangladeshi-Canadian immigrant and a student at the University of Western Ontario. That's a lot of identifiers. He founded the Western's first community for spoken word artists and poets, Spoken Word Society. He has written for several small publications like Young Voices and The Reckoner of MGCI. Ayman likes weaving the many aspects of his often conflicting identity into art that offers a scope into his mind.