Bombs in the Dark

Bombs in the Dark, originally uploaded by premasagar.

The Blow


Who struck first and where, in what joint
of clock time never
matters. When so many of them come
everywhere thudding in, what's worst
is nothing's to be done about it

but swallow hard. Forget. Suffer
doer and done to both
sunk into a hissing pot, the hot metal
quickly smothered, oh quickly —

But the eerie way it vanished! Shot star
across the night blackened,
by day hardly noticed:
innocent minor excrescence, swollen
gland, tree burl
trapped in an irritated throat —

So self seals itself up
as it must, to keep itself whole.
Ignorant, in forced
necessary sleep, the healthy system digests
its own illness first, then others':
scabbed corpses covered,
pothole arteries clogged

with denial: all things blow over
eventually, the houses sit back up,
the cars go back to work as usual —

But the dropped stitch still simmers
heedless, under ground
in forests of acid rain, the slow seep
of wrinkles across fair cheeks,

the stock market clangs shut
at first closing and then again, for which market
when, around the timed world ticks
blow by blow, as the wind settles and shifts

in Delphic caves. In Stygian
wine cellars. In London. Hiroshima. Manhattan,
all poisonous growths encapsulated
only to be spat out

year after year, as each stifled madness,
each new wave finds itself
coming even as it's going, and vice versa,
at the stroke of Radioactive High Noon,

Surprise! Horror grabs us
stunned, in vicious gusts pummeled
from Cape to Cape, from ear to burning ear, tacking

back and forth, from one barricaded
safe harbor, one mass cover-up
to the next, never to rest
ever: how far a single shadow can reach
is not to be known by day, O mio bambino caro
as the world blows itself away.

Patricia Goedicke