I wrote this in South Africa during the summer of 2000, in honor of my parents, who are devoted conservationists. Violence, destitution, environmental collapse - Africa can give you a feeling of apocalypse.

"To My Dear Parents"

by Sarah Ruden

In a new house
I live alone.
My mother and father
Both are gone.
 
They are cancelled by
Electric words
And classed as something
I once heard
 
From a woods now buried,
From a sky now full.
Where are my parents
And their hard will?
 
How huge and fiery
These years have grown,
To make them nothing!
All I have known
 
Since then is God's--
This conflagration,
The horror of
His dispensation.
 
Command or comfort
I have not heard,
But see—burned in my tongue,
These must be His electric words.

Sarah Ruden was born in rural Ohio and raised in the United Methodist Church. She is a “convinced Friend” or Quaker convert of twenty years’ standing. She holds a Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard University and an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. She has taught Latin, English, and writing at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Cape Town, and has been a tutor for the South African Education and Environment Project, an education-enrichment nonprofit in Cape Town. She was a scholar in residence for three years at Yale Divinity School and a Guggenheim fellow, and is now a visiting scholar at Brown University.

"To My Dear Parents" was originally published in The New Criterion, vol. 18, #10 (June 2000), p. 36.