Geraldine Monk

WHILST WE SLEEP IN OUR HEADS - PART ONE

October 1957.

As I laid me down and
slept the sleep of a
watch-with-mother
five year old
everyone else
slept the sleep of
their age a
weeping
extravagance of
radiation
leached its
consequence
through
stone-built
homes
sleep-floating
bones
invisibly staining
our beauteous
to behold
Irish Sea.

Breathe in!

Fairground ducks to the slaughter.
Irony shaped with
perfect symmetry.
Lined up on the promenade we
deeply inhale rude health ridding
industrial crud from
our little lungs.

Breathe out!

This was followed by
paddling the day away in
sewage and the
‘most radioactive sea in the
world’. – Greenpeace

Totally in the dark
faces turned to the
sometimes Lancashire
sun. drank. fission vision.

No one mentioned the fire. Ever.

During WW2 America recruited the finest brains from Britain and Canada to work on the Manhattan Project. Cracking the atom. Together we cracked it. Split. And when the war ended? America pulled down the shutters. Cold-shoulder our shared knowledge. Went paranoid. Super.

Pickt our
brains ‘n’ kickt
our pants.

‘I do not want any other Foreign Secretary of this country to be talked at, or to, as I was.’ - Ernest Bevin

Humiliation gathered a
rolling ball of peril.
Hell hath no fury like a
Foreign Secretary...
The Brits would go it alone.

‘We’ve got to have this (atomic bomb) thing over here,
whatever it costs.
We’ve got to have the
bloody Union Jack on top of it.’ - Ernest Bevin.

Bang on time the first delivery of plutonium left Windscale for Aldermaston and the time was August 1952. I was delivered safe and sound and slightly early. August 1952. Welcome to the world.

‘In one pain I was born’
mused my mother. biblically.
‘And a star rose in the east’
retorted the brother. cynically.

So the Brits finally got their A bomb but before they could shout
yeehaw! America shone a Hydrogen bomb into the bright
atoll blue. It was November 1952.
So now we had to have one of those with a bloody
Union Jack on top of it.

La-laa.

A few days old
I lay in my crib
so pale
so still
they
thought
me
dead so dead
they
froze and didn’t
dare they
left me there
without a
glimmer of
beat.

What a performance!

Tom Tuohy was waiting in the wings.

Since first being published in the 1970s Geraldine Monk has written eight major collections of poetry and numerous chapbooks. Her writing has appeared extensively in both the UK and the USA. Salt published her Selected Poems in 2003. More recent works include Lobe Scarps & Finials (Leafe 2011), Pendle Witch-Words (Knives Forks and Spoons 2012) and, as editor, CUSP: Recollections of Poetry in Transition (Shearsman 2012).