The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 7

O nuclear wind when wilt thou blow

That the small rain down can rain?

Christ, that my love were in my arms

And I had my arms again.

Rock of ages cleft for me,

Let me hide myself in thee.

While the bombers thunder past,

Shelter me from burn and blast;

And though I know all men are brothers

Let the fallout fall on others.

My wife and I worked all alone

In a little lab we called our own.

Six months saw our project flower

And we sold the results to a foreign power.

Ha, ha, ha! He, he, he!

Little brown bug, don’t I love thee?

Home they brought her warrior dead:

She could neither weep nor pray,

For that same bomb from which he bled

Had killed her ninety miles away.

Two blind mice,

See how they run!

They each ran out of the lab with an oath,

For a small gamma ray had been aimed at them both.

Did you ever see such a neat little growth

On two blind mice?

Weather forecasts:

Rain before seven,

Dead before eleven.

A red sky at night

Means it went off all right

Quake, quake, quake

On the cold gray course, O Man.

Eager to do for others

The service we did for Japan.

O hell to the armament race

For the bomb that is better and bigger!

O hell to the thumb on the switch

And the finger touching the trigger.

The Christian scientists fire

Their satellites over the hill;

But O for the touch of a vanish’d Hand

And the sound of a Voice that is still.

Quake, quake, quake

On thy cold gray course, O Man,

Seeking to end the world so soon

After it just began.

Ring-a-ring o’ neutrons,

A pocket full of positrons,

A fission! A fission!

We all fall down.