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First, hello! I’m the still-quite-new Poetry Editor of Haven Spec Magazine. While the first poems I’ve selected from submissions will appear in later issues, right now I’d like to share some poems I’ve loved from other places. When I started gathering poems, they fell naturally into a few categories. You may see more in the future, but the best theme to start to get to know me as Poetry Editor has to be. . . the end of the world.

Now while the general state of the world right now may contribute to my current interest in the topic, the end of the world always seems to be on my mind. I’m a bit of an apocalypse enthusiast. An armageddon aficionado, if you will. Several of my own published poems (including one in Haven itself pre-editorial gig) are, indeed, about the end of the world.

But I’m not the only one. Some of the best-known poems in history involve the big finish. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” says Yeats in “The Second Coming.” Frost ponders whether the world will end in “fire and ice” in his poem by the same name. Lord Byron’s “Darkness” has “The bright sun… extinguish'd.” And of course, Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” has the famed lines “This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper.”

So what are today’s poets writing about the apocalypse? Here are six great poems.

10 Reasons Why the AI Predicted American Salvation
Steve Wheat, Radon Journal, Issue 8, Sept 2024

A list poem! Such a beautiful paean to humanity, and what we’ll do to keep fighting even in the face of oppression.

Evocative line:
“1. The AI never tasted bacon and couldn’t know how hard we’d fight to keep chewing.”

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On
Franny Choi, Poetry Magazine, December 2019

An almost too-present, too-now apocalypse made up of multiple apocalypses. Nevertheless, it shows beauty, and again, humanity continuing despite the end. Also check out her collection by the same name.

Evocative line:
“By the time the apocalypse began, the world had already ended.”

In Dreams, I Cannot Read or Hope
Terese Mason Pierre, Uncanny, Issue 59, July 2024

A dream of the apocalypse in Toronto—or maybe something more than a dream. A proclamation of a lived life buried between the lines.

Evocative line:
“She held her Bible as if she’d been waiting for revelation and laughed.

If the World Is Ending, Why Pretend?
Megan Cartwright, Radon Journal, Issue 10, June 2025

The second on this list from Radon, who do a great dystopia. This poem is a little two stanza romance at the end. Bittersweet and beautiful.

Evocative line:
“The day the bees died we stopped lying.”

Alive at the End of the World
Saeed Jones, on his Substack, Dec 1, 2021

Another almost too present poem, but for a 5-year-old poem, it hasn’t stopped being current. Vivid, visceral. (With content warnings for gun violence.)

Evocative line:
“The end of the world was mistaken for just another midday massacre in America.”

Galactic Lament
Natalie Giarratano, Waxwing

A softer poem than some on the list, the quiet in a forest as the narrator thinks of what might happen one day. But in the meantime, there is now.

Evocative line:
“That night on the lake in new moon darkness, you pointed out the Milky Way.”