Julene Tripp Weaver
Cleaning Up One Problem Makes Another
—Song of Witches (William Shakespeare, MacBeth)
—Japan’s Fukushima Cleanup Minister says refugees from nuclear reactor are on their own (Headline)
Nuclear plants worldwide mess with our
air, our water, our planet, toxic leakage
with its long half-life beyond our lifespan.
Double, double toil and trouble
Who thinks they are so very smart to dump
tritium contaminated water into the ocean,
this cleanup that will never reach its end.
Fire burn and caldron bubble
Wounded by this alchemy towards entropy
(these are not plush toys to put away) this is a
problem that invades our cells, our membranes.
Filet of a fenny snake
Spoiled sacred geometry from such smarts.
Chernobyl tower capped with Zoolite, while
Fukushima contaminates our ocean, our fish.
In the caldron boil and bake
Tritium to join the plastics, the microfibers,
the sonic blasts (our navy’s rave). Who are we
to dare destroy such sanctity and safety.
Eye of newt and roe of frog
Our industrial surge labeled progress. How
will we recover with half-hearted cleanup?
You sent robots into the waste to report—
Wool of bat and tongue of dog
like the canaries in the coal mine—the robots
died, destroyed, like our eventual fate.
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble
Julene Tripp Weaver is a psychotherapist and writer in Seattle, WA. She has a chapbook and two full size collections. Her latest, truth be bold—Serenading Life & Death in the Age of AIDS, published by Finishing Line Press, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards and won the Bisexual Book Award and four Human Relations Indie Book Awards. Her work is online at The Seattle Review of Books, HIV Here & Now, Voices in the Wind, Antinarrative Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, MadSwirl, and Writing in a Woman’s Voice, you can find more of her writing at www.julenetrippweaver.com.
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