Archive
03/16/11
3/11
It's been six months shy of a decade, to the fated day, Since that diabolical, catastrophic collapse at Ground Zero, And now, the world has been cast, once again, Into the fiery maw of man's worst fears, Forced to confront its collective fragility, its core mortality.
But my initial impulse, reaction — To liken this ominously metastasizing reactor disaster, At the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear-power plant, to 9/11 — Falls absolutely, unacceptably far too short of the mark, Begs me summon the ghosts of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
Instead, from suppressed recesses, I recall the dream I suffered, In sleep's no-man's-zone, just after midnight's groaning strokes And just before five of that same a.m. — September 10, 2001 — In which I, a Japanese youth, Feet anchored in Hiroshima's lunar surface,
Arms raised, beseechingly, To a screeching, exploding, irradiating yellow-white sky, Was trying, with all my schoolboy skills and focus, To catch, in my bare hands, That plummeting dove of destruction unleashed by the U.S.,
Hoping to keep that crucible of unimaginable fissile atoms From hitting my city, detonating...but I never did catch it, For its bursting thousands of feet above my desperation, Liquefying me and my fellow innocents, Incinerating our spirits as if they were rice paper in a flame.
But even this 9/11 presentiment fails to justify my anxiety, And I'm left with a vague prescience, a terrifying clairvoyance, In which every single specimen of the species Homo sapiens Is subsisting on an unlimited daily ration Of iodine-131, cesium-137, strontium-90, plutonium-241.
03/16/11
|
|||
|
|||
