Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms in Our Hands
An Anthology of Poetry
Hershman R. John ● Karen Warinsky ● Elizabyth A. Hiscox ● Howie Good ● Juleigh Howard-Hobson ● Michael C. Ford ● Marc Swan ● Alwyn Marriage ● Esteban Colon ● Michael Skau ● Liz Dolan ● Marc Hudson ● Lowell Jaeger ● Lisa Stice ● Steven Stam ● Alex Dreppec ● Anjana Basu ● Rae Wick ● Alex Duensing ● Lana Bella ● Shahe Mankerian ● Paul Lobo Portuges ● Britt Melewski ● Deborah P Kolodji ● Des Mannay ● Darren Morris ● Jonathan Travelstead ● Jennifer Highland ● Dave Buracker ● K.D. Rose ● David Morgan O’Connor ● Mantz Yorke ● Doren Damico ● Margaret S. Mullins ● Bonnie Shiffler-Olsen ● Phil Saintdennissanchez ● R.G. Evans ● Andrew Merton ● Miriam Weinstein ● Brittany Mishra ● William Pitt Root ● John Canaday ● Aaron Lee ● Emmet O’Cuana ● Pamela Uschuk ● Janet Cannon ● Aline Soules ● Mary Gilliland ● Maureen Anne Browne ● Silas Ola Abayomi ● Sarah Brown Weitzman ● Susan Deer Cloud ● Joel Allegretti ● Vishal Ajmera ● Anca Mihaela Bruma ● J.C. Todd ● Ellie Danak ● Matthew David Campbell ● Margaret Chula ● Kath Abela Wilson ● Larry Blazek ● M.S. Lyle ● Benjamin Goluboff ● Laura Sweeney ● C. Wade Bentley ● Michael McLane ● Karl Williams ● Gretchen Fletcher ● Alan Britt ● Michael Waterson ● Jules Nyquist ● Tiffany Lacsado ● Mariko Kitakubo ● Peggy Zabicki ● Harvey Soss ● Shelley Motz ● Jennifer Balachandran ● M. Iqbal Dhadhra ● Jennifer Met ● Kara Provost ● Sharon Coleman ● Dave Andre Davison ● Phoebe Reeves ● Fay Aoyagi ● Miriam Bird Greenberg ● Abigail Carl-Klassen ● Richard Jarrette ● Elizabeth Hoover ● Martha Silano ● Kathleen Hellen ● Fern G. Z. Carr ● Donald Illich ● Colin Dardis ● Joseph Hess ● Nina Lewis ● Amy Brunvand ● Tom Tracey ● Madhumitha Murali ● Cecele Allen Kraus ● Annette C. Boehm ● Lucille Lang Day ● Yuan Changming ● Peter Marcus ● Yun Wang ● Rodney Torreson ● Jason Braun ● Daryll Michael Williams ● Erin Rose Coffin ● Gus Andrews ● Nate Maxson ● Carol Barrett ● Mark Labbe ● Richard Vargas ● Fatima Afshan ● Laura Madeline Wiseman ● Thomas Gordon Reynolds ● Mark Hudson ● Cheryl Stiles ● Paul Brooke ● Kelly Cherry ● Gonzalinho Da Costa ● John Sokol ● Antony Owen ● Heath Brougher ● Mark J. Tully ● Khadija Anderson ● David Anthony Sam ● Bekah Steimel ● Elizabeth Debunce ● Jen Karetnick ● Heather Bourbeau ● Trish Hopkinson ● Don Kingfisher Campbell ● J.R. Solonche ● Norbert Gora ● Jared Harel ● Don Narkevic ● Carl Wade Thompson ● Lauren Bagwell ● Gwendolyn Hart ● Beatriz Fitzgerald Fernandez ● Susan Rose April ● Scott T. Starbuck ● Stephen Mead ● Richard O’Connell ● Lind Grant-Oyeye ● Roger Aplon ● Emily Walling ● Julie Thi Underhill ● Claude Clayton Smith ● Sally Zakariya ● Leanne Dunic ● Nilesh Mondal ● Trina Gaynon ● Nels Hanson ● Sharon Kennedy-Nolle ● Teresa Mei Chuc ● Drew Dillhunt ● Aimee Noel ● Julian de Wette ● Brittany Mishra ● Jennifer Clark ● Amy Uyematsu ●
Vivian Faith Prescott ● Michael Shorb
Vivian Faith Prescott ● Michael Shorb
In Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms in Our Hands is the symphonic voices of 163 poets living throughout the United States and world, in places such as India, Britain, Ireland, Canada, Philippines, Japan, South Africa, Guam, Singapore, Poland, Australia, France, Vietnam, Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, Germany, China and Pakistan, on the impact of nuclear power and warfare on human life and the planet. Navajo poet Hershman R. John's poem, "Theory of Light," opens the anthology. Towards the end of Hershman's beautiful and heart-breaking poem, he writes "The sun's core/is made from turquoise and the moon's mass is made from radiant white shell/lighting the metallic half-life in susurrations across/the Navajo-Hopi reservations." The poems in the anthology take us through Navajo-Hopi reservations, the Nevada desert, Los Alamos, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, Three Mile Island, Trinity, air raid drills, Chernobyl, Pripyat, Ogoturuk Valley, Alaska, Fukushima, nuclear testing in India and Pakistan, and more. In the poems, we experience the legacy of nuclear power created by human hands and its effects on human life and all life on Mother Earth. In the second to the last poem in the anthology, Vivian Faith Prescott, a fifth generation Alaskan of Sámi heritage, reveals nuclear impact in the tundra, the Chuckchi Sea and villages, in her brilliant and chilling poems, "Project Chariot" and "Recipe for Disaster at Ogotoruk Valley." Through the words and clarity of these poets, we see the reach of nuclear impact from the desert to the far reaches of the Artic.
Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms in Our Hands is available on AMAZON and BARNES & NOBLE.
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PABLO NERUDA
Ode to the Atom
Infinitesimal
star within
uranium,
you appeared
to be interred
forever: concealed,
your diabolical
fire.
Then one day
loud knocking
at the tiny
door:
it was man.
With a burst
you were unbound,
you saw the world,
came out
into daylight,
scanning
cities,
your great radiance arriving
to light our lives;
you were
a terrible fruit
of electric beauty,
and you came
to fan the flames
of summer,
but then
he arrived--
armed
with the binocular eyes of the tiger
and armor,
with pleated shirts and
sulphurous mustaches
and the tail of a porcupine,
the warrior came
and seduced you:
“Sleep,”
he told you, “Roll up, atom,
you look like
a Greek god,
bright as a
Parisian modiste.
Now curl up,
lie down
on my fingernail,
slip into this tiny box.”
And then
the warrior
guarded you in his vest pocket
as if you were only
some pill
from North America,
and he traveled the world
letting you drop on Hiroshima.
We awaken.
Dawn
had been devoured.
All the birds
fell charred.
The stench
of coffins,
entombed gasses
thundered everywhere through space.
Uprose, the horrendous
form of
superhuman punishment
uprose—bloodbright mushroom dome,
smoldering cloud,
sword
from the abyssal inferno,
its ascent searing air.
And death spread out
in those parallel waves,
reaching
the mother asleep with her child,
the fisherman at the river
and the fishes,
the baker and the loaves,
the engineer
and his buildings
—everything
was acidic
dust,
assassin
air.
Like a lung the city collapsed,
in its farthest alveoles
it fell, abruptly
overthrown and
corrupt,
the men there suddenly
leprous so that as they
reached for the hands of their sons
those little hands
came off in their own.
And so it was,
blinding spark,
rabid light,
that they drew you out
from your refuge
in the secret
mantle of stone
where the fire slept--
to destroy lives,
to pursue creatures remote
beneath the sea,
in the air,
on the deserts,
in the crooks
of the farthest ports,
to erase seeds,
annihilate spores
and block corollas,
they designated you,
Atom,
to level nations
and convert love into a black pustule,
to incinerate the heaped-up hearts
and obliterate
their blood.
Oh lunatic spark,
go back
to your shroud,
bury yourself
in your mineral robes,
return to being blind stone,
deafen yourself to such criminals;
involve yourself, yes,
but with life, with agriculture,
replace engines,
increase our energy
and vitalize the planets.
You have no
secret
and can walk
among men
without that terrible
disguise,
speeding your progress
and extending
the seasons for fruits,
cleaving
mountains,
straightening out rivers,
fertilizing
and overflowing
the cosmic
cup,
Atom,
return
to the tranquility of the cluster
and the velocity of joy,
return to the confines
of nature
and put yourself at our service,
and instead of the fatal
ashes
of your mask,
instead of the unrestrained hells
of your wrath,
instead of the menace
of your terrible brilliance,
surrender to us your astonishing
defiance
that it may increase the harvests,
your unbound magnetism
to establish peace among men,
and then the dazzle
of your light will be
not hell,
but happiness,
hope for dawn,
an earthly charity.