The Letters of Robert Oppenheimer: Postscript
by Hildegarde Flanner
(originally published in a review of the book The Letters of Robert Oppenheimer in The New Republic, 1980; republished in 100 Great Poems by Women, edited by Carolyn Kizer, The Ecco P, 1995)
To forget him! To forget all of him!
To forget the beautiful skull where genius shuddered!
Suffer him to sink into the white sand
Where his mind pierced the stones and the stones
Marvelled. Consider the stones, they fell in two
And the heavens were speechless. Take alarm.
Did he pray—God, do not make your own God
Of me? The Almighty cleft him
Clairvoyant in a desert of peril
And he rose to meet the world’s oncoming princes
Riders riding on many wheels, and rose
To smash the pure monolith of the Creator,
And the desert fled, matter fled away,
The century split, East fled under West,
And the planet sickened.
Therefore the cities were demolished,
Therefore the people broke into fire.
No need to proclaim who did it. There were
Others. On him the rage of glory falls,
On him the magnificent O.
Forget him.
On the breast of good he came upon evil,
And the two faces faced and hated.
Forget him again. He was never at peace.
There he goes, goes with his two fatal ones
Linked and torn, by furies torn and linked.
Do not touch him as he passes.
He is immortal, he is poison.
Down the longest labyrinth let him go,
Now the doors are all locked,
locks locking locks.
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