poem: A weekly poem, read by the author.

"Otto Frisch Discovers Fission, 1938"

By John Canaday
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2007, at 7:19 AM ET

Click here to listen to John Canaday read this poem.


Rare earth sparks the clouds
*******between two wars.
Fermi, Hahn and Strassman,
*******Joliot-Curie—
all chemists, physicists,
*******track protons now.
But Hitler's blinders point
*******to Austria.
The occupation interrupts
*******Aunt Lise's
parting of nature's mists.
*******When she departs
for Sweden, isotopes
*******of radium
(she thinks) sit on her desk,
*******unanalyzed.
Lonely, she summons me
*******north to Kungälv
for our Christmas ritual.
*******Her colleague's letter
intercepts festivities.
*******The body's tagged.
Identified by Hahn.
*******It's barium.
I strap on skis; she demurs,
*******makes good her claim
to move as fast without.
*******The woods that wall
the Göta älv become
*******our conference room;
a fallen spruce's trunk
*******our sticky seat,
my pockets stocked with scraps
*******of hotel paper.
We know uranium
*******can't crack in two
against the grain of Gamow's
*******alpha theory.
Yet it does. We turn
*******to Schrödinger
for insight: particles
*******are waves. Then Bohr:
a nucleus is liquid,
*******like a drop. Our thought:
that heavy nuclei
*******must undulate
like water molecules,
*******collectively.
In larger elements
*******charge balances
the surface tension. Struck
*******even lightly,
in neutron capture,
*******the pseudo drop
will wobble, waist, and split.
*******Sometimes physics
lacks words for what we think.
*******Its abstract paths—
quantum tunnel effects,
*******packing fractions,
and disintegration—
*******lead to thickets
where neutrons multiply
*******like rabbits, wildly.
The winter woods are gone.
*******The mind's meadows
bloom as I calculate
*******the energy
released: two hundred million
*******electron volts.
Now atoms break and breed
*******like living cells.
I name their splitting "fission"
*******and publish it
where even Nazi stooges
*******can read the news.

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John Canaday's first book of poems is The Invisible World; he is also the author of a critical study, The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics, and the First Atomic Bombs.
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Click here for an archive of "Poet's Choice" columns from the Washington Post.
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