Our second sun

· by · in free verse, poetry. ·

It’s the blisters forming,
second, sometimes even third, degree;
like drinking moonshine
or the tom yum gai on swollen tongues.
It’s chap of lips. It’s claws
extending from the
mushroom cloud,
Hiroshima, a second sun
we try to bury in Chernobyl.

I still remember
how the rain felt strange
that morning nineteen eighty six,
and how I thought my
skin would peel, and marrow boil
from those hands extending
through that drizzle on my face.

And you took my hand and said:
“Did you know that Marie Curie’s
notebooks
still is kept in a leadlined box?”

Mushroom Cloud from Nagasaki bomb

Mushroom Cloud from Nagasaki bomb

Izy challenge us to write about fire from a different sun at toads, this brought me to atomic bombs and that radiation… hope it works.
—-
September 9, 2016

18 responses to “Our second sun”

  2. What a unique narrative perspective you have chosen here – to even imagine what it must be like to experience fall out, makes me shudder and you put me there at ground zero. Really superbly done.

  3. Extreme heat, approaching the energy of the sun, except zillions times more to earth because of distance. Scary but nice lines. I’ll have Tom Yum Goong instead of Guy. I eat a lot, similar. Instant Spicy Ramen Noodle Shrimp Lunch (dry, in bid, add boiling water), 29c US, at our local Kroger Grocery Store. Very popular with the college students. I add more shrimp and peas, both frozen.
    ..

  6. I am glad you wrote of this “other” fire…..I might have as well, in light of this morning’s news about North Korea (nuclear power in those hands is terrifying.) The cloud in the photo looks like a gigantic fist……….I remember how the air felt , too, in 1986. I had to be out in it, with compromised lungs and I paid long months after, with a hacking bronchial cough.

  7. Oh my, I thought of this very topic when I wrote my poem. What horrible atrocities humans have inflicted on the world. I am from the United States and it was my country that dropped the bombs on Japan. 1986 is just a wink in history as far as distance from 2016, Such a scary world we live in.

  8. Excellent! The horrors we impose on our fellow man are almost indescribable, from mediaeval tortures to chemical warfare.

  9. It’s great observing how you continue to evolve as poet, Bjorn, writing in this second language to boot — trying to empathize with the invisible razorings of radiation like a bit of hot Thai (or the passionate ministrations of sum young guy, ha ha) — then taking us the rim of Chernobyl in 1986 and what emanated there. The final statement is a wonderful button to it all.

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