Atom | The Poetry Foundation

It is sixty-five years since Hiroshima,

they write. Should one cup a handful of water from a river,

there is certainly in it at least one atom of oxygen

that Cleopatra exhaled, I have read,

or was it Marilyn?

I hear my daughter’s sobbing

through the wall, in whose marlstone joints

still trembles a tear of builder’s sweat.

The house is secreting saliva from the bedrock.

When she struggled her way into the world,

I paced the room.

Had she been given a gift

of one atom from Hiroshima?

Source: A Secret Life, translated by Nathan Fields. (Blue Diode Press, 2021)