STRANGELOVE (OR, THEY WANT YOU TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE MOTHER OF ALL BOMBS)

She was made to birth an arsenal
of sharp edges, slapped into a wail
for confrontation by men who demonize
the world to anoint themselves exorcists
& meanwhile wonder where the better angels
of our nature have gone. Perhaps she’d have
told us of precariousness, the vanishing point
between life & death, the dimming of our
collective horizons, that sanguinity means
optimistic but also blood-red, bloody. That
mother bombs dropped on mother lands
make us all children of destruction, the planet
a hungry mouth, or rather, an empty hole, into
which pour gallons of glacial weep & the ashes
of charred fields, the skeletal remnants of a
civilization that dreamt of power as a blessing
to render us all accursed. Perhaps she’d have
looked at us with the wry smile of one who
recognizes irony, who possesses the strength
to abide intended consequences, who recalls
the words to the lullaby humming deep in our
collective veins. Perhaps she’d have rocked us
to sleep on an earth slick with rebirth, cozy &
womb-damp, lodging a seed of doubt behind the
first inkling of a molar, to be tongued gently &
nurtured to maturity so that we know when to
be sure. Perhaps we are all waiting for an
admonishment louder than the shattering,
louder than certainty, soft enough to coax
an insurrection of doves from the ashes.

By Nina Sudhakar

Biography:

Nina Sudhakar is a writer, lawyer and first-generation American. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Litro, Arcturus and Miracle Monocle; for more, please see www.ninasudhakar.com.