Mountain War Time

‘Will Mount St Helens continue to build until it surpasses its former majesty, or will it blow itself apart in a new fury of destruction?’

National Geographic, Vol. 160 No. 6, December 1981

Renowned for its height and perfect cone,
the American Fuji-san
now rises with a broken crown

above the slopes made mud- and ashscape,
burying bobcat, spotted owl and elk.
Ghost vapours from a methane lake

unfurl, before the pearly everlasting
and the lilies of the avalanche
emerge. Trailing blackberry, lupine,

bracken fern, disguise the scars
of that May day in this volcanic arc.
The Cascades shaken, parted

from old certainties. Remember,
here, this is the Ring of Fire,
the lava flow not far from where,

made pure, Element 94,
plutonium, formed Fat Man’s core –
the Sumo Bomb, its promised rain of ruin:

molten kimono flowers singed to skin,
a city threshed and sewn with blossoms, fissioning.

Isobel Dixon grew up in South Africa, and she now lives in Cambridge, England. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Financial Times, The Guardian, Magma and elsewhere, and she has been commissioned to write poems for the British Film Institute. This poem is featured in her most recent collection The Tempest Prognosticator (Salt), and was written for Roddy Lumsden’s 50 States commission in 2008 on the state of Washington. Plutonium formed the fissionable core of the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and the Hanford Works atomic energy plant in Washington State (in which Mount St Helens stands) was instrumental in the development of the bomb. “The Atomic Age began at exactly 5.30 Mountain War Time on the morning of July 16, 1945,” wrote William Lawrence after witnessing the test blast for Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Well Versed is edited by Jody Porter.