Hiroshima was a truly happy place before the Americans destroyed it
(Image by shankar s.) Details DMCA
Bomb the pristine lake.
Bomb the mountains.
(footnote: Volcanoes are sometimes measured in Hiroshimas.)
Bomb the volcano!
Bomb the city.
Bomb the northern lights if you want to.
Are you crazy?
Short answer: Yes.
Long answer:
Yes, but I'm saner than most.
Sanity can be defined as what you think about.
Or what you don't think about.
By the first definition, I am crazy.
By the second definition, not.
But, by the second definition
More people in the United States are insane
than not.
And, by the way, this is common knowledge
To any part of the world that is not America.
Here is the kind of thing I think about:
Trinity looked like General Sherman.
As the mushroom cloud rose and foliated
On a pillar of the super-heated radioactive ash of Gaia,
I saw General Sherman.
(footnote: Trinity was Oppenheimer's code-name
For the "gadget" that turned the desert into green glass
At Jornada del Muerto. (Day of the Dead)
Even the dead where appalled by the detonation that day.
(footnote: I am only imagining that the dead were appalled
But it seems reasonable that they would be.)
(Footnote: General Sherman is the world's largest tree,
named after the guy who is perhaps
The Bid Daddy of modern warfare.)
(footnote: You can look at most trees
Without shaded goggles
Unless the tree
Decides to reveal its energy body
At the core of its quantum field
Which is too bright to see with the naked eye.
(personal footnote: I know because I have seen it.)
But, in the meantime,
Where was I? Oh yes,
Bomb the boreal forest.
Bomb Russia.
Bomb the United States.
Bomb the idea of the United States.
Bomb all parallel United States.
Bomb the Barrier Reef.
Bomb all the shithole countries.
Bomb this poem.
Bomb your insomnia.
Bomb whatever you want
For surely, I will bomb whatever I want.
Bomb each other.
Yes, we would love to come over around 6.
Yes, we love goat cheese.
We will bring a bottle of red wine and a salad.
We will toast to friendship and tell stories
That will make us laugh
And like each other all the more.
It will be like the end of "Don't Look up"
Except we won't all die yet
Because we bombed that ending
To smithereens.
.......
Reflection:
When I posted this poem I attached the above photo of Hiroshima before we bombed it to dust, incinerating 70,000+ people.. The photo is of a busy street, perhaps a market. The beautiful arcs of moonlike lanterns give the whole scene an enchantingly otherworldly appeal that is very inviting. Hence my definition in the poem of insanity as what we think about and what we don't think about. The poem develops this theme of sanity VS insanity by implying that we are a civilization of bombers. We bomb because we are insane. We bomb what we don't see, and we bomb what we do see. Take the government sanctioned wolf kill or culling or "harvesting" in Wisconsin. They kill (or bomb) what they see, a bloodthirsty predator that has no place in their state, and they bomb what they don't see, a (according to the Blackfeet tribe) sacred creature whose cosmic counterpart guides the dead along the path of the Milky Way, to the afterlife. Or another example, what we saw when we bombed Hiroshima was a military target. What we didn't see was a cultural center that posed no threat to the United States. When you look at the Northern Lights, what do you see? Are you bombing it or loving it? (If you want to "see" the Northern lights take the mushroom before you look at it and report back to me. )
(Article changed on Jan 27, 2022 at 1:51 PM EST)
(Article changed on Jan 27, 2022 at 6:16 PM EST)
