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The Spike [: or, Victoria University College Review 1957]

Hydrogen Bomb Tests

Hydrogen Bomb Tests

A pillar of white smoke
Three miles up in the sky
As an emblem for our times;
Those small things we live by,
Love of wife or child,
Care of a green plot,
Are denied by this giant folly
And the day must come when not
One vestige of charity,
Compassion for suffering,
Will remain of our shredded comfort
And man shall be as nothing.

Yet an emblem for the times
Is what we need; for those few
Who have the heart to make
Decisions and pursue
Even to outer darkness
Love's meaning for our day,
Carrying their defiance
Under a threatening sky,
March out against the crowd,
Cry out against the surge
Of inhumanity,
And with their whole beings urge
A better way to declare
All that is great in man,
Sure, beyond bomb or slogan,
Since our journey began.

page 76

We shall earn by indifference
Hiroshima or worse,
Children screaming at emptiness,
The blind man's curse,
The crippled lamentations
Of tattered bodies thrown
Into a pit of flesh
As putrid as their own.

Casuist politicians
Chasing fanatic dreams,
Thin-lipped, may cast upon us
A thousand dooms,
Or one long doom in a moment.
The shattering of man,
Ending the dreams we've cherished
Since the journey began.

So it must happen
If a pushed button can kill
All strength and loveliness
And destroy the human will.
Now the shape of the world is made
In a pillar of white smoke.
If it should grow taller
Our human love will choke.