Everywhere is the touch

My sister wrote this some years ago. Johnstown is where we grew up. It was a steel town until the steel industry went belly up. The final stanzas employ Suzy Q. Groden’s translation of Sappho’s Fragment 105a. The image immediately below is by ChatGPT.

Johnstown, Pennsylvania, USA
1959

Everywhere is the touch
of nuclear sting. Radioactivity
haunts every fear.

Breaths away from dying.
Breaths away from surviving.
It was the Cold War.

Postures of iron & steel
captured to synapses banished
by a shadow for bodies.

We are the ones
whose life in outerspace
is kneeled into questions

speechless for words.
Just how a girl can create
calm inside this fear,

this flesh. . . not to be
a finish of note into nothing
beyond. Lasting.

Lasting in musical scores.
Even the July-June sun
is greyed to the gleam

for waste existing
where it was unknown before.
That the dead are outlived

by nuclear bombs
pitches me unexpectedly
from supper’s chair:

another air raid drill,
urgent with its siren call
of uncrowned chaos.

Food is eaten away
long into the moment later
by the spoon bailing

Mother’s story of The Flood.
Now? No more servings? Ending again
with the next and the next flood.

Oh, is brother ever relieved
not to be singled out by the creamed corn.
Survive. Yes, people did, he said.

The mud, the meatloaf. To be somebody
who trumpets the sound of green trees.
Family of four here. Rarely heard crying.

The cat too survives. We are the ones
who remember its nine lives. Let us celebrate
the Big Bang and all its domains

exploded out of full circle now.
Berserk living through storybook chemistry!
Someday, the moon lands.

Father sneezes for his own sense
of smell with home again. The certainty.
Gravity as impersonal

in this century
as the last. And the arc
hailed by the golf ball

equally the loft then again
timed to green a foot away.
Now, spinning. Just when.

Simplicity? Where?
Authority by which to leap. Symmetry.
Ironclad trappings to open

moments alone from after-
dinner conversation, have a wink of tea?
Imagine the order a spark sees.

Voice in quest of a body.
Aired in delights, perhaps even
laughter in a song’s light-year.

Speak to me, o moment,
you comic of everafter half-life.
Missing your legs,

soothe this decay
with the sound of your voice
alone. Sappho also

was startled by life,
life with this mother sun.
The quenched Earth.

Exile we all share.
“.  .   . like the sweet-apple
that has reddened.  .   .

And the apple pickers
Missed it there - -   no, not missed, so much

As could not touch.  .  .” 

* * * * *

Coda: As this graffiti photo from December 2006 testifies, we are still haunted by the threat of nuclear war: