Leonard "Red" Bird was a poet with a unique perspective on the nuclear age.
As an 18 year old marine, he was ordered to observe a nuclear explosion in the Nevada desert in 1951 -- to dig the foxhole, get in, get out, and view the blast through blackened photographic film, on command from loudspeakers mounted near the viewing area.
His poem "Mourning Dove" is a searing description of that moment that reverberates today.
Leonard died last week of bone cancer, almost certainly as a result of his exposure to nuke radiation. He was a tough man and a survivor, who left an incredible legacy for our times in his poetry. Read an excerpt below, and then say a prayer for the USA. And maybe buy a copy of his book "Folding Paper Cranes" for a more complete view of his experience, which is relevant to us all in the nuclear age.
http://books.google.com/...
Here is an excerpt from Leonard Bird's poem, "Mourning Dove"...
I placed my hands upon the ledge and twisted
from the trench, just as the pale sun, not quite
obscured by the gray scrim of atomic dust,
rose above the far hills. But as my head
rose above the trench, my outstretched hand grasped
a soft spastic form, and as I touched I saw
the bleeding dove, its feathers blasted by
our manmade sun. A torn mourning dove flopped,
twisted from spasm to spasm, its wings singed black.
I smelled the stink of charred flesh, a stench
as old as life but rendered fresh by the wrath
of progress run amuck: Verdun, Warsaw,
Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Nagasaki,
and a hundred waiting towns whose tightly
woven strands of life our brilliant future
may too soon unwind.
That dove's melted eyes oozed gray pus.
And from a throat that had sung Man awake
since the dawn of time bubbled a faint
"Squwick, squwick, squwick."
That mangled dove still smolders, radium
etched upon my soul. In my twisted dreams
that squeaking dove again becomes
the Holy Ghost, whose gray tears are shed
for man, for homo ludens, whose mad games
will someday self destruct.
end of excerpt.
I heard Red read this poem. It affected me greatly.
I thought at the time that this might be one of the most important poems to bridge the 20th to the 21st century. What sort of debt do we owe?
It would be easy for me to list the trespasses against humanity since that day in 1951 when we tested nuclear devices on human witnesses. We have other ways to violate humanity now -- and they are additive, not replacements.
I feel privileged to have known the man.