Spring Morning, 1952


There is a mathematics in the air,
Another smell,
A new chill to the thawing mud
Under a dead-looking forsythia bush;
Logic is swollen with
The recurrent psychosis of the crocuses,
The square roots of ice,
The glittering fractions of morning.

The violence is a violence of scale
Shifting suddenly away from us
In triggered weather;
Bloom after bloom erupts
To release a vast
Fallout of pollen broadcast on the earth.
The planet which was put here for our use
Grows soluble and simple in our hands.

In this formula
Where the world works on paper,
When spring comes at last
Through a rough complex of muddy variables
From alphabetic shambles to new law,
You need not even look;
Once the math works,
The bomb will work.

Note:

The last two lines of the poem are the words of
Edward Teller, a principal inventor of the
hydrogen bomb, quoted from a television interview
with Larry King. Dr. Teller was explaining why
he had never attended a test of the hydrogen bomb,
which was first exploded in 1952.

(Larry King and Emily Yoffe, Larry King,
New York, Simon and Schuster, 1982, page 156.)