Legacy

Fukushima nuclear plant burning after tsunami and earthquake in 2011

Legacy      

I clutch at my eyes when I think of you, nuke.
I remember your soft hum and icy aura
and I always think “We’ve gone too far....”

I cannot grasp it.
How can it be
that you could one day melt at your core
and somehow could melt down the core of me
and my baby one day could arrive
with no legs or no eyes....

Will there be schoolchildren one day,
in a thousand years, maybe?
They will visit our monument.
“Here we guard the plutonium.”

Before now, they left to us
Stonehenge and harpsichords,
aqueducts, bibles,
but we are leaving an unspeakable poison,
almost eternal,
a ceaseless worry visited on all yet-to-be-born.

I clutch at my eyes when I think of you, nuke.
My heart twists in pain.
Shamefully, inwardly, I beg,
“oh my sweet Earth,
my Mother,
I’m sorry,
so sorry.”

Annelinde Metzner
December 1980

Nomura family, near Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan. (Eric Rechsteiner)

READ MORE about the current conditions in Japan after the Fukushima meltdown.

It is almost two years since the colossal earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan that killed 20,000 people and caused the world's worst nuclear disaster in 25 years. The Nomuras' home city of Koriyama, an inland commercial hub with 337,000 people and shimmering views of nearby mountains, was spared the tsunami's monstrous waves. But it could not escape the clouds of radioactive particles that spread widely, following multiple explosions at the Daiichi plant. The total amount of radiation released into the air was (depending on who funded the estimate) between 18 and 40% of the quantity released during Chernobyl in 1986 – and over an area of Japan with a population density 10 times greater. In the aftermath, radiation levels in Koriyama spiked at 30 to 40 times higher than legal limits, contaminating the city with caesium and other long-life radionuclides for decades to come.                           
                                  Guardian/Observer, February 23, 2013