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Life on Earth

This poem is not about the election, but it does accurately represent the way I feel about it.

William Shunn
2 min readNov 6, 2024

I wrote this poem in 2018. I’ve read it a few times in public, including at a poetry event at the Langston Hughes House in Harlem, but this is the first time I’m sharing it online.

This poem is not about the election, but it does accurately represent the way I feel about it.
Photo by Frank McKenna on Unsplash

“A second man pleaded guilty on Thursday to arranging the transport of dozens of immigrants across Texas last year that ended with 10 of them dead or dying in a sweltering tractor-trailer in a San Antonio parking lot.”
Reuters, March 8, 2018

hell is other people
a swelter of two hundred or more
packed like Christmas trees
in this black, rumbling oven

could be a thousand
bodies, degrees
take your pick

jostling molecules
struggle to cohere
in this boiling plasma

we cluster like penitents
at the bullet holes
in the siding
each in turn placing
lips to stigmata
mouthing our paeans
to the great god Oxygen

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William Shunn
William Shunn

Written by William Shunn

Writer, poet and puzzle maker. Hugo and Nebula Award finalist. Author of The Accidental Terrorist: Confessions of a Reluctant Missionary. He/him/Bill.

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