Japan Washes Ashore in Oregon by Catherine McGuire

I.

Two years later, debris scuttles onto the shingle:

fishing boats, brass bowl, a temple gate,

scrap wood, a window frame, shop sign –

there's no closure to some wounds.

Buried in black and beige sand drifts:

someone's smashed mirror, holding

fractured clouds, broken sky.

II.

Unseen, uninvited, radiation floats

then burrows.  The vast currents

that trawl the sea

leave long, invisible streamers.

The truth leaks more slowly

than cesium, plutonium, tritium.

Data, well buried. Don't connect

neighbor's cancer,

the slowly dying trees, those shriveled,

Cerebrus-headed sunflowers.

Don't think about hungry ghosts

devouring flesh and leaf

in the night.

Catherine McGuire, OR, USA