August 6

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“Go get dressed. You’re no man for this army!” 
I went, thanking for the first time the crook 
In my spine that stopped me buck naked 
From buck privacy, and took me back to you 
After a three-hour, not a three-year separation. 

Together we heard the celebration: 
Hiroshima Wiped Out! With one bomb! 
With one bomb! Now the war will have to end! 
We celebrated with the rest. Celebrated the bomb, 
Celebrated rejection, celebrated your birthday, my love. 

For forty years now, to celebrate your birthday 
We’ve had to celebrate the bomb, but on 
A sliding scale: from first exuberance 
To slow knowing to terror now. Your poor birthday, 
Growing on an opposing scale, tonight 
Gets only a bad movie as celebration. 

The spine that bought my rejection 
Has cost me plenty since in pain, but none 
Like that of the bomb I failed to feel as pain. 

“The crowning savagery of war!” J. Reuben Clark
Called those bombs. But we dismissed him:
Old and embittered. I’m old and bitter now.
I call him back to witness—against me,
Against all who would not hear, who do not hear. 

The speed of light squared! That bomb still lives,
Mushrooming in our memories, a ghost in the galaxy
A thousand times alive in its sleek rude brood
Begotten of that equation 
On technology, the mushroom prefiguring
And portending, Cassandra-like, the progeny
Expanding at the square of the speed of light. 

Ah, love, let us be true . . . The ebb and flow
Are sucking and swelling to a tidal wave!
Our leaders run like children 
Down the sand in the deep ebb sucked out
By the coming wave, like children down the sand
To pluck for their crowns the shining baubles
Bared before the wave. 

We love. That may be all we do or have
When the wave bursts over us. 
And if the voice of apocalypse be not heard
We must at least let the silent waves of our love
Be known: We love.