Rapture Anxiety

It’s a thing now, five decades

Later. Now, everything is

A thing, even the Rapture,

Which has never happened, won’t,

Can’t, ridiculous notion,

Absurd interpretation

Of a centuries-old dream

About what would happen next

In the Roman Empire’s east

Among seven cult churches

In Western Asia Minor

Quarreling amongst themselves.

There was no America,

Much less Americans raised

In terror of the Rapture,

Honed on tales of Left Behind,

When someone wrote instructions

In visionary language

To struggling communities.

What if it was a genre

More akin to Samizdat—

Undercover contraband,

Encouraging to outcasts,

Deliberately coded

As a wild-eyed prophecy—

The way Soviet authors

Dressed doubts in science fictions?

Probably unlikely, yet

Allegory’s dangerous

Like that—make your fantasy

Lurid enough, it could be

Still terrifying to times

You’d have never imagined.