Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
Bombs – All Sizes
-As Jack Kerouac did not say
If we are all going to be destroyed…let that bomb when it
comes find us doing sensible and human things praying, working, teaching,
reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to
our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened
sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do
that) but they need not dominate our minds.
-C.S. Lewis, “On Living in an Atomic
Age,” 1948
Bombs fall tonight, but then
they fall every night
Conceived over single-malt,
born of the generals
Suffering not at all as their
electronics systems
Guide them in the ways the
Bible salesman deems
Bombs fall tonight, on a
nuclear facility, they say
We can only ask the ashes and
winds
While in our triumphalist
Ozymandian presumption
We fancy that bombs will
never fall on us
Bombs fall tonight – and have
we been doing
Sensible and human things?
