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Heather Spears

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A Song About Spent Uranium

 

                       anybody know a song about spent Uranium?
                                                 — Winona Baker

Winona and all the little poets of Canada
are feebly comforting one another
this last evening of the year
though come to think of it
it’s still daylight over in Canada
it’s damn well evening in Iraq
and evening here
in spent Europe and we are all spent more or less
and uranium
has to be unspent surely to cause us harm.
and the future
we will or will not know
includes the spending of uranium at a pace
measured in centuries, a half-life more slow
even than glass runs, and we can’t watch, though the melt
and dump of ancient ice may quicken for us, the seep
of brackish water and the build of unimaginably violent
storms

Poets
are making sense out of their senses
as well as they can - an event,
the stoic death of a pitiful truncated pinchheart man
with dead light brown eyes looking at nothing and no one —
recharges them, their hands
cramped over the paper
or the keyboard or in the case of the most unlucky
over a cake of soap
in the Gulag or Guantanamo
they have to speak
who knows
what will come of it?
it may be worth its while -
mild and valuable like breath or grass

 

Page(s) 248

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