Kilchattan

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 16:01:03 -0400

The sun is hot today. We drive to the southernmost part of the island. We take off our clothes. We line up, toes curling round red red rocks. I am a little bit afraid. I am excited. I cannot swim.

One by one we leap into the sea. It’s my turn. I launch myself through the air and plunge through the surface. I sink and sink and sink, and I wait for a moment, buried under a few feet of water. Then I claw my way back to the surface.

My hands work a little. They work badly. They slap off of the rock I’m trying to grip. Eventually I get a hold, and scramble up its dusty face. The sharp shells of hundreds of long-gone limpets open micro-cuts on my hands. They bleed like dozens of paper-cuts, stinging as they mix with the salt-water. I try to wipe them, but just spread the bright-red mixture across my skin. I give up. I am exhausted. I collapse into a makeshift bed of towels and wild grass.

i didn’t appreciate the taste
of raspberry-flavoured shower gel
but i thought it was hilarious
that i’d deliberately mistaken fragrance for flavour

and then i realised everyone left two hours ago
and the walls didn’t care.

Adorno said “Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”. I would like to revise it and say, “keeping silent after Fukushima is barbaric”.

Japan has been irradiated 3 times: HIroshima, Nagasaki then Fukushima. Engraved on the memorial cenotaph in Hiroshima is an epitaph: “Rest in Peace, for we shall not repeat this error”.

However, our country has committed the same error, guised by the hallucinatory proclamation to use nuclear energy peacefully. No excuse can be made for those tens of thousands of people who were lost to the atomic bombing and the subsequent radiation poisoning.

Now that the worst accident in history has awoken us from our deluded slumber to “use nuclear energy peacefully”, the next step is to prove to the worlds that people and nukes cannot coexist, whether it be for weapons or electricity.

Hennepin Ave.

Kilchattan