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?
