hydrogen bombs exist
a plea to die

as people used to die
one day in ordinary

weather, whether you
know you are dying
or know nothing, maybe

a day when as usual you have
forgotten you must die,
a breezy day in

November maybe, as
you walk into the kitchen
and barely manage to

notice how good
and earthy the potatoes
smell, and barely

manage to put the lid on,
wondering whether you
salted them before you
put the lid on,
and in a flash,

while puffs of steam
leak past the lid, barely
manage to remember your life
as it was and still
is, while the potatoes

boil and life, which you
always have said must go
on, really does go
on, a plea, an
ordinary plea, an

ordinary day, that
life can continue
completely ordinarily
without it ever happening
that any of all

the cruel experiments
that the Teller group
performed on
Eniwetok where
the waves of the
Pacific raged in fury,
or any of all
the experiments that

the Sakharov group
performed on
Novaya Zemlya where
the waves of the Arctic
Ocean raged in fury
without these
experiments or those
of the British French

Chinese ever reaching
real real-
isation here where we
still live in a
real real
world as opposed to
the unreality of
Novaya Zemlya

and Eniwetok; here I
walk down to the still
blue of the Sound shining
with evening, toss
a stone into the water,
see how the circles
widen, reaching
even the farthest shores