Steven Schroeder | jornada del muerto
with Zhang Jiuling in mind
On the day before the seventy-fifth
anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima,
I walk three blocks to “Nuclear Energy,”
the bronze mushroom Henry Moore
made to mark the site where
the first “controlled” nuclear reaction took place
almost eighty years ago, naming names.
Manhattan. Chicago. Los Alamos.
Mescalero. Hiroshima. Nagasaki.
And I contemplate just how many places
it has taken since. Enrico Fermi was not certain
it could be contained, and that is why
what started in Manhattan
continued under a squash court
in Chicago, where a library now stands.
I stand in the shadow of the mushroom,
between the library and me, considering the way
the bomb moved in the process of making it,
how where it was at any given time
depended on how expendable
the neighbors were thought to be
if they were thought to be at all.
At Los Alamos, they prepared to unchain it,
in mountains called Sangre de Cristo.
Near Mescalero, the powers that be let it go
unchecked for the first time where conquistadors
had marched centuries before. They say
Fermi, still doubting this force could be contained,
thought the firestorm might reach Amarillo. And history
has proven what he might have said more than
half right. Ask the farmers
whose land was taken after the war
before they could harvest the first good crop
after a long drought to make way for the factory
that made the bombs that, by lying
in wait, have killed so many
in the slow burn
of the long cold war.
What we got wrong about nuclear winter
was the timing. We thought it was a future thing,
coming, when it was here and now and we in the middle of it,
as we always are. Waning,
the moon, still
almost full,
brightens the whole of heaven.
And, imagining an other in Hiroshima
looking at the same moon, waiting
for the moment the bomb fell
without warning, I leave
a message with the moon,
turn, and hope for dreams.
Chicago
5 August 2020
