When the World as We Knew It Ended

The poem refers to oil and gas. In the second stanza the speaker says: “Oil was sucked dry / by two brothers. Then it went down. Swallowed / by a fire dragon, by oil and fear” (Lines 4-6).

The “two brothers” (Line 5) are a reference to David and Charles Koch, who, at that time, jointly ran Koch Industries, an oil and chemical conglomerate. The brothers’ company has taken oil out of the earth from many sites in and outside of the United States. Harjo’s line conflates oil and fear, and suggests that the economy around fossil fuels has led to war and conflict, exploitation of workers, and ecological degradation. The poem personifies oil and fear, meaning that it gives them human qualities. It personifies them as a dragon, as something that swallows the Twin Towers. In this sense, fear, oil, and the dragon are the debris pile the Towers collapsed into and the fires that burned on the site for weeks.

The speaker links oil with the burning oil fields of Iraq. The idea of being “Swallowed / by a fire dragon” (Lines 5-6) makes the oil larger than any one person. A dragon is mythical, special, often imbued with special powers, but also capable of great destruction.