‘To Live in the Zombie Apocalypse‘ is a poem by teacher, poet, and filmmaker Burlee Vang.

As with any analysis of a poem, it should start by reading the poem in its entirety (some would say at least twice). So check out the poem, and then come back for the analysis.

Let’s first look at how the poem opens.

To Live in the Zombie Apocalypse

Burlee Vang The moon will shine for God

knows how long.

As if it still matters. As if someone is trying to recall a dream.

Believe the brain is a cage of light

& rage. When it shuts off, something else switches on.

There’s no better reason than now

to lock the doors, the windows.

Setting the Scene

The title is doing a lot of work to situate the reader. Without it, the zombie-apocalypse setting could be missed. The poem could be read as describing the experience of a survivor in a war-zone. There is an overall feeling of disorientation, fear, violence, and animalistic survival in an unraveling society. But the zombie elements, with the exception of the title, are not so pronounced.

The clues are there: words like “brain” and “rage” evoke the zombie mythology, as does “a world of flesh / & teeth”. But these could just as well be interpreted only as evoking our violent natural instincts. The boys in Lord of the Flies could be said to have lived in “a world of flesh and teeth” in this sense.

Sometimes I like having to work a bit to pull the meaning out of a poem. But in this case, I think the poem works better with a title that firmly situates us in the zombie apocalypse setting.

One of the features that I find interesting about this poem is the way it continually keeps us off-balance and disoriented. This effect is felt more strongly if we begin from a firm footing and are knocked from it. For this reason, I appreciate the scene-setting work that is done by the title.

Disorientation and Disrupted Expectations Through Line Breaks

The poem uses line breaks to disrupt our expectations and keep us off-balance. Because of this recurring formal element, the reader feels the chaos and confusion of the speaker.

Nothing is certain in this poem. Things change in an instant. We feel disorientation, a need to continually find our footing. We are lost in the confusion of the fight for survival, along with the speaker. This effect is achieved in large part through the judicious use of line breaks.

Consider the first line:

The moon will shine for God

This is most readily interpreted, prior to the line break, as meaning “for the sake of God” -until this interpretation is disrupted in the next line:

knows how long.

Our brain is forced to backtrack, to re-parse the words, and amend the meaning of “for” to indicate duration (God knows how long) instead of a beneficiary (God). This backtracking knocks us slightly off balance and gives a subtle feeling of disorientation, compounded by the certainty of our first interpretation to the doubt of “God knows how long”.

It is also interesting that this backtracking effectively erases “God”, who turns from an entity prior to the line break, to a dead metaphor across the threshold of the line break; in the first line there is a “God”, and in the second line “God” is gone.

A similar effect is achieved by the line

[…] Save the books

which, prior to the line break, means to preserve knowledge. It implies the importance of preserving books, and all with which that is associated: our cultural, social, and intellectual heritage. That line is followed, across the line break, with the words

for fire […]

We are forced to backtrack again to reinterpret the words we have just read. Again, we feel the disorientation as we move across the line break. And again, something important has been lost: the value of books has been destroyed across the threshold of the line break.

The first line showed us God, then erased God across the line break. These lines show us our cultural, social, and intellectual heritage, and then destroy it across the line break.

A similar disorienting effect is achieved with the lines:

we learn to read

what moves along the horizon

In the first line, we are given the suggestion that the survivors will pick up the pieces of their society, to rebuild the intellectual fabric of society, until the line break disrupts this hope: they are learning to survive in their new world, and to kill.

Contrast of Light and Dark

This poem makes great use of sharply contrasting images and, in particular, a contrast between light and dark. In the first stanza we have the glow of the moon. In the second we have the brains described as a “cage of light” that shuts off. The porch-light is turned off. A fire is lit, for just two words, before we return to darkness. Shadows flicker.

I really feel the darkness in this poem, and I think that is in part because it is contrasted so sharply with the images of light that appear earlier: the moon, the fire, the porch-light, the “cage of light” that is the brain.

All the images of light becoming darkness are symbolic of the zombie mythology. Through its use of contrasting light and dark, the poem embodies the transformation of human to zombie.

Final Words

I hope you enjoyed this short look at some of the elements in Burlee Vang’s poem, “To Live in the Zombie Apocalypse”.

I write posts on poetry and craft once a week. Check back soon for more posts like this one.

Thanks for reading.