Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White, and today is Monday, November 8th.

Today I'm going to read for you a poem by an American poet Kara Jackson.

Kara Jackson is a singer and a songwriter and a musician and a writer from Oak Park, Illinois.

She served as the third National Youth Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2020.

And she's the author of the collection of poetry, Bloodstone Cowboy, which was published in 2019.

And the poem is called The World is About to End, and my grandparents are in love, and this is how it goes.

Still, living like they orbit one another, my grandfather, the planet, and grandma, his moon assigned by some gravitational pull.

They have loved long enough for a working man to retire.

Grandma said she's not tired. She wears her husband like a coat that survives every season,

talks about him the way my parents talk about vinyl, the subject salvaged by the tent of their

tongues. Grandma returns to her love like a hymn,

marks it with a color. When the world ends, will it suck the earth of all its love? Will I go

taking somebody's hand, my skin becoming their skin? The digital age is taking away our winters, and I'm afraid the sun is my soulmate.

That waste waits for a wet kiss. Carbon calls me pretty, and I think death is a good first date.

I hope when the world ends, it leaves them be, spares grandpa in his game,

Grandma spinning corn into weight,

the two of them reeling into Western theme songs,

the TV louder than whatever's coming.

This poem was one that kind of stopped me in my tracks

when I encountered it. It's a poem about old love, about enduring love that sustains us through trial, about the power of love to anchor us to each other and to a world of the lover's making, even in the midst of external chaos. It's a beautiful and a

true statement about how love saves us in a harsh world. But, and this is what I really loved about

the poem, that's not all that the poem is about, right? It's also a poem about fear. The poet contrasts her grandparents old love

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