Finlay Worrallo

How to Survive History

Seek the little brown forgettable days
that taste of bread and eat them, knelt
on the grass spouting in craters.

Invade the underwater universities
a century hence, where they study us. Scream
in their faces:
I’d like to see you survive this. 

Dig up your dead and sit them down
with water glasses; pick their brains
on how to live through the unprecedented.
Stare into black-and-white eyes and ask:
where
did you find the courage, knowing the end was unwritten
and you were always at the edge of the known?

Perhaps the dead will tell you to rip the wheel
from history’s grip and remake it with clay-
stained hands, paint what you see onto pots.
So:
make those students cite a million sources.
Flood their future archives. 

Gift them stories to read aloud
until their throats burn. Give them your name.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Finlay Worrallo is a cross-arts writer studying for a Creative Writing MA at Newcastle University. His work is published in magazines such as Impossible Archetype, Pennine Platform, Rust & Moth, Gutter and Magma and in the speculative fiction chapbook Unfurl: Portrait of Another World (The Braag, 2023).