Photograph by Michael Monteleone, (c) 1998

Winter Nights in the Cold War


After the Green Run, she said
The snow was milky, radiant
Beautiful light falling over
The sheep, glowing cold and lunar
But the moon was new that night
Its great eye closed to the vision
And still the strange snow sparkled.
Next morning after all the snow
Was gone, all melted in the sun
Those luminous flakes remained
Silvery and too bright, too hard
Fallout fallen across Montana range
Deep in the winter of 1949
When we were all unknowing,
All innocent, all downwind.

Later came the time she called
Night of the Little Demons,
When all the sheep were born deformed
Tiny monsters, some so twisted
Such scrambled creatures she was forced
To reach deep in the mother's womb
And break their limbs to get them free.
Next morning after all the lambs
Were gone, all melted in the sun
Of our atomic spring, her baby
Stuffed her mouth with dirt
So full she could not cry out
Sat wonderingly in the garden
Child tasting, testing the world
Holding the warm radioactive soil
In her throat, all unknowing,
All innocent,
All downwind.


(c) 1995 Margery Snyder


This poem first appeared in Green Fuse, Poems of Witness, Ecology & Dissent,
 No. 22, Spring/Summer 1995.




Back to the Astrophysicist's Tango Partner Speaks