In praise of never existing at all

Hello,

I am featuring at the Cannon Mine Poet’s Monthly Reading on Thursday 7/9 from 7-9pm at East Simpson Coffee Co in Lafayette. I’ll read for a half an hour and there will be an open mic as well! Come listen!

Meanwhile, I am in New Mexico for the weekend. There is red dirt on my feet and on my clothes and all over the car. This is a good thing. The sky is so blue. Here is a poem about this and about bombs and beauty and all other sorts of things.

thirty miles north of los alamos
and a few hundred from white sands
I sit in red dirt and look out at the sky
it is wide and blue
made bluer in contrast
by the reaching redness
the faint green of the juniper
the lines of white
in the far off mountainsides
eighty years ago
just around the corner
we did something
we never should have
but a few arroyos over
and many decades later
there are no booms
just the chimes on the porch
singing softly in a faint wind
though that wind
carries slow death
death that will last
thousands of years
death that we made
when we took
the smallest thing
we could find
and smashed it with another
but the mountains still stand
and so do the trees
the slow death
does not apply to them
not really
just to us
you did not become
the destroyer of worlds
mr. oppenheimer
you just destroyed us
we have mostly destroyed ourselves
but there is hope yet
for everything else
for here amidst the sagebrush
just beyond the ruin
it is almost as if
we never existed at all
oh, that we never existed at all

Alexander

This week beyond the paywall: a discussion of the wide and reaching west and some prompts around us never having existed at all.

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