Photos by Yosuke Yamahata, August 10, 1945. Poem by Allen Ginsberg, 1978.
The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again…every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.
— Walter Benjamin
Nagasaki Days
I — A Pleasant Afternoon
for Michael Brownstein and Dick Gallup
One day 3 poets and 60 ears sat under a green-striped Chau-
tauqua tent in Aurora
listening to Black spirituals, tapping their feet, appreciating
words singing by in mountain winds
on a pleasant sunny day of rest — the wild wind blew thru
blue Heavens
filled with fluffy clouds stretched from Central City to Rocky
Flats, Plutonium sizzled in its secret bed,
hot dogs sizzled in the Lion’s Club lunchwagon microwave
mouth, orangeade bubbled over in waxen cups
Traffic moved along Colefax, meditators silent in the Diamond
Castle shrine-room at Boulder followed the breath going
out of their nostrils,
Nobody could remember anything, spirits flew out of mouths
& noses, out of the sky, across Colorado plains & the
tent flapped happily open spacious & didn’t fall down.
June 18, 1978
II — Peace Protest
Cumulus clouds float across blue sky
over the white-walled Rockwell Corporation factory
– am I going to stop that?
*
Rocky Mountains rising behind us
Denver shining in morning light
– Led away from the crowd by police and photographers
*
Middleaged Ginsberg and Ellsberg taken down the road
to the greyhaired Sheriff’s van –
But what about Einstein? What about Einstein? Hey, Einstein
Come back!
III — Golden Courthouse
Waiting for the Judge, breathing silent
Prisoners, witnesses, Police –
the stenographer yawns into her palms.
August 9, 1978
IV — Everybody’s Fantasy
I walked outside & the bomb’d
dropped lots of plutonium
all over the Lower East Side
There weren’t any buildings left just
iron skeletons
groceries burned, potholes open to
stinking sewer waters
There were people starving and crawling
across the desert
the Martian UFOs with blue
Light destroyer rays
passed over and dried up all the
waters
Charred Amazon palmtrees for
hundreds of miles on both sides
of the river
August 10, 1978
“Give us the weapons we need to protect ourselves!”
the bareheaded guard lifts his flyswatter above the desk
– whap!
*
A green-letter’d shield on the pressboard wall!
“Life is fragile. Handle with care” –
My Goodness! here’s where they make the nuclear bomb
triggers.
August 17, 1978
VI — Numbers in Red Notebook
2,000,000 killed in Vietnam
13,000,000 refugees in Indochina 1972
200,000,000 years for the Galaxy to revolve on its core
24,000 the Babylonian Great Year
24,000 half life of plutonium
2,000 the most I ever got for a poetry reading
80,000 dolphins killed in the dragnet
4,000,000,000 years earth been born
Summer 1978
Allen Ginsberg
Ginsberg sat at a great distance from the sorrow, and though a great poet, the poem was ultimately about him and not about the reason so many gathered at Rocky Flats, the dull horror of a yellow hazed day with hot radioactive winds blowing, so many dead and the wind burning the very marrow out of the living.
