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Showing posts with label post-apocalyptic heroic narrative versus vicious reality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label post-apocalyptic heroic narrative versus vicious reality. Show all posts

Monday, March 28, 2011

Radioactive Utopia [Today's News Poem, March 28, 2011]

Radioactive Utopia [Today's News Poem, March 28, 2011]

Nuclear age monsters despise the reactor
That granted them powers.
Even Kaczynski would target professors
For like goes to likeness,
Wasting competitors, trashing the sources
Of powers, mutations.

I swear when Japan hits, I'll grow to a tower
Of iron, emitting my wavelengths of gamma.
I swear when the riots have burnt down the city
I'll rule from my palace of Twinkies and cistern
And start it all over again, this time better—
But first the explosions must shatter the windows
And shadow the basketball players at hoop-time,
And sprout from the concrete, a mushroom of promises;
And shrivel humanity: slugs must be salted.

"At least 15 states have found trace amounts of radiation from the crippled nuclear plant in Japan, but officials say the levels of radioactivity are much too low to prompt health concerns."
—Judy Keen, USA TODAY, Updated 9h 43m ago as of 7:34pm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/environment/2011-03-28-radiation-usa_N.htm

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Sunday, October 31, 2010

Will You Walk Again? [Today's News Poem, October 31, 2010]

Will You Walk Again? [Today's News Poem, October 31, 2010]

True, there are many who think of the aftermath;
Weeping, yet filled with a sense of adventure,
Bold curiosity—that sort of thinking.

I've long considered death by disaster:
The bullets, explosions—friends who've gone mad—
And never thought that goodness could survive

Hunger or loneliness; much less the panic.
Everything happens—must happen—and moments
Simply are judgments confirming the worthy

And worthlessness, based off one's actions
With graves to assort us, by faction.

"The last of the Kennedy old guard, Sorensen was a tireless defender of his legacy. Never, privately or publicly in the years since, did he take credit for the words or actions that made the 35th President an icon of the office."
— Adam Sorensen, Time, Sunday, Oct. 31, 2010
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,2028527,00.html

"The relationship between the atomic bomb and postwar popular culture is as intimate as it is complex. It stretches right back to the almost contemporaneous invention of the teenager, in the winter of 1944, as the new model of youth: this product-hungry, pleasure-seeking individual was the perfect person to inhabit the new psychology of a world that could be blown up at any moment."
—Jon Savage, guardian.co.uk, Sunday 31 October 2010 21.31 GMT
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/oct/31/pop-music-atomic-bomb-jon-savage

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jackszwergold/sets/72157621722066256/





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