Poetry Explorer


Classic and Contemporary Poetry


LET THREE DAYS PASS by JANE MILLER

First Line: LET THE ONE RELEASED FROM FEELING
Last Line: SHOWERING EVERY TWO HOURS AND SCRUBBING THEIR HAIR.
Subject(s): NUCLEAR ACCIDENTS; POPULAR CULTURE - UNITED STATES; TELEVISION; CHERNOBYL; THREE MILE ISLAND; TV;

Let the one released from feeling,
merged in the neutrality of doing,
let him be the image of God.
Turn the channel to him, focus,
and let him float across your screen,
allied with mass culture.
I saw it, right on TV, and
I taped it on VCR. The color oozes
into reality even now, at midnight, during the
lightning flashes for which He is famous.

Nothing looks this good but really
the technical imagination makes it so.
Don't you think?
Here's a final minute, boundaries removed
and lightning on the sacrificial stage.
Eternity is caring for others,
the worst winter ever, where one does not exist
in a landscape but in an obscurity

exactly as lousy as the core meltdown
of the Brother nuclear facility. The first
two thousand die right away. And
the others, the Polish schoolchildren on the border,
the Romanian schoolchildren and the schoolchildren
schoolchildren wait fifteen years,
showering every two hours and scrubbing their hair.



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