Spoken Word, Topic 5: Paradise Interrupted

I read an article today that my professor wrote a couple of years ago about a woman named Almira who survived the 1954 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands.   She was 10 years old at the time and has been living on Oahu ever since.  She and her children (the few that survived birth) still suffer from the effects of radiation.  I never really learned about the nuclear testing from a victim's perspective, and I was so disturbed that I had to get it out with a poem. Somewhere in Shane Claiborne's book he wrote that God likes to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess I must have forgotten how comfortable I am. :P Anyway, this is Almira's story:

Our voices have been silenced by their pens
our people have been hushed by their history,
so I'll whisper the radioactive story
of how I came to be a scientific experiment
in the laboratory of the South Pacific
and I pray the truth will spread
faster than the cancer in my body.

An old Marshallese from Rongelap,
I was born in the nucleus
of an atomic age -
a medical marvel
plucked from that island inferno
deep in the exploding sea.

Without evacuating us first,
the military detonated Bravo,
history's most lethal hydrogen bomb,
one thousand times more powerful
than the deadly sack they opened
over the homes in Hiroshima.

The contaminated mist blew downwind
and infiltrated every breath
as the archipelago sunk
under a heavy plume, bright and hot,
the earth had hurled itself
into the core of the sun.
A white blanket of hot air descended,
shadowed by thick gray particles,
and I fell back with the others,
coughing and gasping,
needles over my whole body.

The navigators of the steel naval ship
came for us, not caring
that their massive chemical cloud
blurred God's starry map.

They picked us from our land -
spoiled fruit from a poisoned tree -
our skin dry as coconut husk,
our milk and meat saturated
with radioactive chemicals.

The nurses in the clinic
poked at the bubbles on my skin,
scrubbed its raw, glistening craters,
and washed the matted ash from my hair.

Over the years they examined me
as I lay on sterile beds -
an aging stain on white sheets.
They monitored the mound
that grew tall on my thyroid
and they delivered my son,
born silent and still as my homeland.
He looked like a bunch of grapes,
a pile of jellied limbs.

My tears and their money
never filled the tragic void
that only God could,
for he has promised me
an uninterrupted paradise.

** Even though this is history and not news, please pray for Almira and all the other survivors and children and grandchildren who continue to suffer.  (Some children are born with scarcely any bones in their arms and legs, leaving only stocking-like limbs of flesh. Locals call them "jelly babies." ) Only God can take them to a paradise that is of eternal peace.