A Flash

By Ed Romano

Volume 24, Number 1, Racial Capitalism
July 14, 2021

A B-2 Bomber’s lazy hum metamorphosizes
Boom! Flash! A port town leveled
By a pencil drawing of atoms on a notepad
Transmuting into a knee¹ dropped
On the neck of a marked people

Condemned for their scars

The Apple bitten in Eden
Is the same that struck Isaac
Falling from paradise
Disintegrating into superheated air
Rising up into ruffled contours
Culminating a Promethean quest
Grandstanding to God
An ode to the Devil and his machismo
A fissile cigarette, lit after coitus
Totem of Total destruction
Prefigured to lord over all life
Daring to reduce it back

To atomic dust

They say to themselves:
The firstborn shall inherit the earth!
Their übermensch by divine right
Charting the course and setting the flame
To detonate those holy conflagrations

They would engulf this planet

Its subjects bow in fear
Nodding to the Γogic in its M.A.D.ness
Their nations, like moths
Hypnotized by its fire
Must know and possess it
And eventually burn in it

Under the flag of Might

Supremacy by those
Who would enclose bounty into borders
With no land left
For a free soul to till
Summoning the spectre of

Fear to the commoner

Forcing a forfeiture of their will
To reorder the world into those who recoil
And those who clamor for quiet
Meanwhile the clerics profess birth from the rib
divinity fashioned after their image
With the marked, scrubbed from the feet
They urge those who tremble at the barrel’s end
To submit to what is new- and -clear
Reducing those who strive
Into capitulated dreamers

They wake

To menial employ,
To duplicitous treaties,
To live under Empire—
Under the fist of thermonuclear monarchy.

About the Author

Ed Romano is just someone trying to survive late-stage capitalism.

References

1. Scarry, Elaine. “Memorial Days: the racial underpinnings of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.“ The Bulletin Of Atomic Scientists. August 3, 2020. https://thebulletin.org/2020/08/memorial-days/