Operation Crossroads

FROM our hideous vantage point
We watch the frame of things disjoint;
Feel what once was solid ground
Quaking underfoot, unsound;
See humanity unkind
Of a sudden stricken blind
By the works of its own mind;
And the dream of ages slain
By the process of the brain.
In Time’s dark forward and abysm
We predict our cataclysm,
Infer by horrible deduction
All the details of destruction,
And feel our narrow souls constrict
Because of what we must predict.
Thought enthroned conceived the crime
“That ruins the great work of Time.”
And the horror she has sown
Poisons Thought upon her throne.
Seek no more sweet solitudes!
There the terror most intrudes.
Crag and wood and stream but whet
His grief who labors to forget.
Rather in the market speak
With the troubled and the weak,
The tremulous and timid throng —
For none hereafter shall be strong.
You will got no counsel clear,
Nor any word of courage hear.
But it is better not to flee
From that packed Gethsemane
Where, what Man loosed upon Mankind,
Man cannot find the art to bind.