“Now We are All Sons of Bitches”
It slips away.
Standing where water meets shore
the questing tendrils of the leviathan
pull sand from beneath my feet.
I curl my toes yet,
wave after wave,
I sink deeper into the morass of this island.
And I wonder, how can this be
when the island itself
is sun-blanched driftwood?
Sometimes it just slips away.
There was a fire and a ship.
We set flames to timber
and the ship sank
and grains of civilization
rustled out with the indefatigable
tide.
We lit the fire . . .
we let the fire
go out.
And I cannot remember why.
My name is . . . .
Kenneth D. Reimer
You might note two allusions here. The first is to Kenneth Bainbridge. He was the director of the Trinity test of the Manhattan Project, which took place July 16, 1945. Bainbridge called the Trinity explosion a “foul and awesome display” and remarked to J. Robert Oppenheimer immediately after the test, “Now we are all sons of bitches.”
The second reference is to Lord of the Flies. That novel is set in the time of a nuclear war, so I have created a moment looking through the eyes of the character Ralph.
I thought it might be interesting to intersect these two perspectives.