Lemmings Into The Sea* Poem by Terence George Craddock (Spectral Images and Images Of Light)

How to watch an atomic blast?
From 200 miles away, hands over closed eyes.
Even then, light is so intense
you see all the bones in your hand.
Within miles of epicenter, everything vaporizes.
You are ash in atomized flash.
Lucky you, slowly drifting to radiated earth
radioactive fallout - atomized out of it now.

Winds over 500 miles an hour
hurl buildings bodies through air.
Those in shelters are pressure-cooked
by giant incinerating fire storms.
Bacteria, from millions of unburied dead,
produce all manner of admirable epidemics.
Your immune system - ruined by radiation
you are at merciless mercy of horrific plagues.
The luckless living envy the ashen dead.


Much as dedicated doctors
would like to help
you in this, your hour of agony,
they will not be alive.
City, health workers, medical supplies,
do not exist! Only
molten memories of a bygone time.

Forget it all, speak of neutered now
in safe terminology of science,
United Nations comfort us now.
Ostrich head in sand man
I see only apocalyptic apathy,
in your ironic terms now.

Ours is an unprecedented age
we witness surgical agony of birth,
on a tightrope, with repercussions echoing
to doomed depths of oblivion.


Outstripped evolutionally morally
in a new sociology we grapple
with conflicting split emotions,
by virtue of new trinity necessity.

Peacemaker Missile? Hitting multiple targets
in same guideable instant of misguided time.
Enhanced Radiation Warhead leaves buildings intact
kills only targeted metropolis people.
Warfare finally in regimented step
with the jaundice judicial process
which places property and wealth
above undervalued human life.

M.A.D. not meaning insane
but Mutual Assured Destruction.
20 megatons a bomb equals a thousand Hiroshima’s.
Plus one Trident submarine, carries 24 missiles,
with 408 warheads like a thousand destroying suns?


Nitrous oxides
from a fraction of man’s
nuclear stockpiles
would destroy,
earth’s critical filter.

Children live near meltdown,
Atomic Power Plants,
building radioactive sandcastles.
Play in contaminated dirt die young
must be the new nuclear flu.
Dump lethal waste in dying sea
it is only lethal radioactive waste
for a quarter million, half life years?

And cast concrete blocks might last
200 hardened years possibly?
I want to grow up not blow up
scribbled on the wall in crayon.


Who is going to kill
a million dollar a minute industry?
Unintelligible.


The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima, August 6,1945 was potentially possible, after the Manhattan Project produced the first three viable weapons. The Trinity Test, July 16,1945, was the successful ground based test of Gadget; a plutonium bomb, atop a 100-foot tower, in the Jornado del Muerto Valley in New Mexico.

Copyright © Terence George Craddock
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