Magic Lantern Day

Hail the blest atomic morn
Unto the earth a bomb is born
The pebble bed reactor core
Up to the sky ascends.

Hail the blest atomic sea,
Its mouth in Oak Ridge, Tennessee
Whose lips untouched with blasphemy
Our glowing eyes attend

Bishops wrapped in Bedford cloth
Said pride would cast our victories off,
The Deep Blue to our Kasparov
Our moral thoughts impart.

Time will fill the rubbish yard
fill the hospitals, fill the graveyards
But neither time nor I can hold your 1985 Chernobyl heart.

Brightest and best
Are the children of the morning.
Dawn on our darkness
And lend us thine aid

In unmysterious ways
We re-enacted closet plays
From charming, Magic Lantern days
For the android whales below

You’d be cast as the Nazarene
In the unrepenting desert scene
Near to me, your Mary Magdalene,
Our Lady of the Snow,

Brightest and best
Are the children of the morning.
Dawn on our darkness
And lend us thine aid

Star of the west horizon deforming,
Come dawn in our darkness.
Lend us thine aid

Guide where our infant redeemer is laid
Guide where our infant redeemer is laid