Down Wind, Down River

by Bill Witherup

For Frederick Wayne Nelson, down river, who was in the bio-path of the Green Run, 1949

Oh say can you breathe
By the dawn's early wind
What so proudly we made
At Hanford Engineering Works:
Iodine-131, plutonium, ruthenium.

At the dawn's early light
Irradiated meadowlarks
Filled a young boy's heart
With isotopes of beauty.
Particle and wave shimmered
Over the river stones.

What so proudly we hailed.
Looking for arrowheads
After my morning paper route,
By the hot Columbia;
Bike sparkling with flakes
Of mica not mica.

"Roll on Columbia" Woody.
Salmon smolt stunned
As they hit the outflow plumes.
At twilight's last gleaming
I-131 sifting on sage and thistle,
On sweet, newly-cut alfalfa.

Plutonium in the hog swill,
Ruthenium in the jackrabbit's eye.
The pure products of America go crazy.
By the dawn's early light
Hiroshima flickers white-hot,
Nagasaki fuses with the sun.

Particle and wave,
What physicists proudly hailed,
Who used murderous intellect
To invent deadly winds; military
And scientific elite gassing their own
Workers, soldiers, and children.

Down river, down wind;
I-131, plutonium, ruthenium.

---Seattle, 1996
– William Witherup

Science factoids

• Green Run facts