Here’s a poem I wish I didn’t like enough to include and share. It comes from the time in our not so long ago history when nuclear power plants were all the rage, the latest recommended thing, presented as the hope and the answer. This was before the San Onofre plant on our coast was shut down and we’re still trying to decide what to do with the radioactive waste. Those were more innocent times, but even then we asked the questions which haven’t yet been answered. It’s good to ask questions, even better to demand their answers. After all, we have to live with them, whatever they may be. The friends in the poem were real friends, and we wouldn’t eat the fish they caught, no matter how hard they tried to compel or cajole. Some lines just have to be drawn.

The poem appeared in New Mexico Humanities Review, Vol 8, No. 2, Summer 1985.

Strange Fish

At San Onofre the PR Man fed
us the absolutes of “safe” and “always”
became annoyed when pressed and shoveled
the counter-rhetoric and “irrational” and “unscientific paranoia”
referred to the proto-plant in Germany which
had been built with care the cost
American prohibitive the PR Man of the energy business
balancing certain profit against
the uncertain risk of human lives
how clear like water it all is

Across the road our friends their camper
parked the cheap vacation
down below fishing for strange fish
in the vented waters that have touched
the heat from the splitting heart
bathing in the unnatural thrill of artificial warmth
the same Pacific heave across which thousands
of further miles for generations the Japanese
have been netting strange fish
feeding their children on distorted flesh