Some writers against nuclear weapons are haunted by fears not of annihilation but of mutation, of what misshapen children might be born in an irradiated world. Among the works dramatizing those fears the most eerily zestful is Thomas McGrath’s “War Resisters’ Song,” first collected in 1988: “Fornicating (like good machines) / We’ll try the chances of our genes.”
McGrath (1916–1990) grew up in a North Dakota farming community; watched as his family was foreclosed on; met Industrial Workers of the World members, “Wobblies,” among the seasonal farm workers; and became a radical. He worked as a labor organizer in New York, editing a union newspaper there, then served in the Army, in the Aleutian Islands, during World War II. He taught at Colby College and at Los Angeles State College, from which latter post he was dismissed for his 1953 noncooperation with the House Committee on Un-American Activities. (He said: “a teacher who will tack and turn with every shift of the political wind cannot be a good teacher.”) He found other jobs later, at North Dakota State University and Minnesota State University at Moorhead. The critic Reginald Gibbons called him “the most important American poet who can lay claim to the title ‘radical’.”
Come live with me and be my love
And we will all the pleasures prove—
Or such as presidents may spare
Within the decorum of Total War.
By bosky glades, by babbling streams
(Babbling of Fission, His remains)
We discover happiness’ isotope
And live the half-life of our hope.
While Geiger counters sweetly click
In concentration camps we’ll fuck.
Called traitors? That’s but sticks and stones
We’ve Strontium 90 in our bones!
And thus, adjusted to our lot,
Our kisses will be doubly hot—
Fornicating (like good machines)
We’ll try the chances of our genes.
So (if Insufficient Grace
Hath not fouled thy secret place
Nor fall-out burnt my balls away)
Who knows? but we may get a boy—
Some paragon with but one head
And no more brains than is allowed;
And between his legs, where once was love,
Monsters to pack the future with.