2020 was one hell of a year (or, more accurately, a year of hell). Just remember, though: things could always be worse…

Comparatively Harrowing

By Joe Nazare

Imagine the horrors depicted by Edwards’ venomous sermon,
His Puritanical harangue of the many listeners congregated:
Visions of the wicked held dangling by a slender metaphysical thread,
Precariously poised between a loathing Jehovah fired with wrath
And the devils perennially ready to catch those downcast into lasting misery.
No great comfort, for sure, to receive such a nightmarish awakening,
A rhetorical tour de force that ostensibly steers toward redemption
Yet sounds utterly fixated on the stark graphics of damnation.

Then consider that evocation of infliction preferable to this classic alternative,
A grim myth of torment, as later captured by the Goya portrait:
Shaggy Cronus grown savagely carnivorous in his averting of prophecy,
His Titan eyes wide and wild with monstrous insecurity
As he insists on capitally punishing his own innocent offspring.
Yes, better the whiff of brimstone than the coppery stench of shed crimson;
Cooking over the Pit couldn’t be any more hellish than serving as a raw recruit,
Seized up and gorily reduced, dinner in the hands of a mad god.