will be short. It will be quick. The car engines will suck back their toxic fumes. The shepherds will put down their sticks. The phones will ring all at once and then all at once will stop ringing and no one will pick up. Everyone will be sitting on something. A flat rock. A dirty pavement. The edge of a ruffled bed. Everyone will be looking to the left. Kitchens will smell of burned sage and soldiers will abandon their sleeves to the heat of a broken field. The field will cover the dead with daisies and the desert will turn into a single grain of salt. Everyone will be thirsty. A child will switch off the TV. A river will remember itself. Women will run outside on younger feet and lovers will call their lovers to the window to show them how all the barbed wires had turned into threads of wind. Everyone will be looking at what’s left. And you and I might talk again on the last day on earth. You might still have something to say to me. You might still want to show me how much I was wrong.