Debut at Alamogordo

by Douglas O. Linder (2020)

Opening night.

The show is just hours away.

The director smokes cigarette after cigarette,

Drinks cup after cup of coffee,

And-of all things—decides to read poetry.

Baudelaire.

He’d done everything he could.

Assembled a cast of hundreds,

Taught them what he knew,

Gave them the tools they needed.

But still.

He begins to pace.

The star of the show is on stage,

Winched to the top of a tower.

Tight in a layered dress,

Scrunched from the size of grapefruit to the size of a golf ball,

Buried in a metal globe studded with detonator plugs,

A device the director calls his “Gadget.”

Plutonium is ready for her big debut.

Nature itself appears anxious.

Frogs mate like crazy in a nearby pond.

Lightning streaks across the desert sky.

It’s raining dogs and cats on the mess hall’s tin roof.

Will the director call the whole thing off?

The skies finally clear.

At 5:30 am, the announcer says “Now.”

The director, flat on the ground, ten thousand yards

From his leading lady at ground zero,

Turns his goggled face to the sand.

Ignited, chemicals surrounding the plutonium explode,

Releasing a shock wave,

Compressing the ball of plutonium to critical mass,

Firing beryllium and polonium neutrons,

Starting the chain reaction

Causing a searing flash that lights

Every nearby ridge, crevice and mountain peak.

The director feels the building heat and speaks:

 “It worked,” Robert Oppenheimer says.

The growing fireball, first white, turns yellow, then orange, then red,

And climbs twenty thousand, thirty thousand feet,

Hovering now as the thunder rolls in,

A brilliant purple cloud, plutonium purple.

The audience, of course, is thrilled.

They yell, clap, shake hands.

The purple cloud was really a hit.

It was beautiful.

In Acts Two and Three,

An ocean and three weeks away,

Two hundred and twenty-five thousand people will die.

People who are not props,

Not even actors.

“The poor little people,” Oppenheimer will call them.

You knew this was a tragedy.