Poetry

By Vivian Faith Prescott

 

Project Chariot

... in this enlightened age, the great powers of the earth, both of the East and of the West, are interested

 in human aspirations first, rather than in building up the armaments of war .—Dwight D. Eisenhower

 "Atoms for Peace" speech, Dec. 8, 1953 before the general assembly of the United Nations on peaceful uses of atomic energy.

 

Father Teller

he sits in his Chariot

holding his arms outstretched

across Ogotoruk Valley— Port Thompson

proclaiming

 

     I am the visionary

     I will reshape the earth to your pleasure

 

this tussock of heath vegetation, this nothingness

sedge—lichen—moss

I will unearth riches untold

economics, politics

a deepwater harbor—can you envision it

 

six thermonuclear bombs

160 Hiroshimas

a credit to our geographic engineering

blasting America into a new age

with a flash of white light

as hot as the temperature inside the stars

 

over one million degrees Fahrenheit

2.4 megatons, radioactive

earth dust floating across the tundra

the Chuckchi Sea, the villages.

 

You children, hear me

I will create a neo-Genesis

I will thresh them down into plowshares

and make atoms for peace.

 

      I am the visionary

      I will reshape the earth to your pleasure.

 

 

Raven Addresses Trickery

“This whole day have I followed in the rocks/

And you have changed and flowed from shape to shape…”

—William Butler Yeats, Fergus and the Druid.

 

You cannot conceal yourself

amidst the warm waters of a new sea,

 

sailing against the current of past events,

cruising on your Slow-Speed Sulzer,

 

black gold in your hull. I still detect

a light sheen trailing behind your court appeals,

 

tarballed plea agreements, rejecting billions

in liability. You cannot camouflage

 

beneath your painted mask—30-million

dollars spent repairing your holed and ripped

 

forepeak, center and starboard slop-tanks.

I sense your fold-over, wrapped in a

 

Marshal Island flag, waving bands of sunrise

and sunset, colored orange and white

 

for bravery and peace: a twenty-four-point star

on a blue Pacific palette. Soon, I will hurl the sun

 

at your metamorphosis, your double-hulled

contortion, peck at your new name scrolled

 

across your bow—The Sea River Mediterranean,

until your shamed myth flakes from your skin,

 

your steel hull rusts irreparable, transforming

you into scrap—an end-of-life vessel

 

“fetched up hard aground.” Then I will bear

witness, mocking you from atop your mast,

 

exposing to the world the shape-shifter

as you really are—the Exxon Valdez.

 

  *The 'fold over' is a form of shape-shifting technique when new flesh forms over the original form.

 

  

What’s in a Name?

What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet— says Juliet,

from Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare.

 

After the horrors of Fatman and Little Boy,

someone decided

to give those mushroom clouds a name

like we name hurricanes.

Let’s personalize them,

name them after neighbors, friends, lovers,

and even mothers.

Call them

      Charlie

               George

                         Mike

                               Annie

                                      Nancy

                                              Harry

                                                     Pricilla

And someone thought it amusing

to give nuclear bombs Indian names:

      Seminole and Totem

                  Apache and Mohawk

                           Blackfoot and Dakota

                                        Buffalo and Bighorn.

 

Funny,

now my own country

makes conventions

reducing nuclear arms,

prohibiting their construction—no more testing.

But who’s to say that someday, a name

                like Gandi,

                             Dalai Lama,

or Nobel

will mushroom up in irony, fire, and smoke—

trailing over all our histories,

these broken promises

             like treaties imploding

             on themselves.

_______________________________________________________________

Vivian Faith Prescott was born and raised in Wrangell, Alaska. She has a Ph.D. in Cross Cultural Studies. Vivian is the Co-Director of a non-profit called Raven's Blanket based in Wrangell, Alaska, designed to perpetuate the cultural wellness and traditions of Indigenous peoples through education, media, and the arts. Her work has appeared in Turtle Quarterly, Cirque, Cutthroat, and Permafrost.