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What Sparks Poetry is a series of original essays that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our new series of Ecopoetry Now, poets engage in an ecopoetic conversation across borders. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay.
I was born
because of love
inside a weapons lab.
The End—
Omega Bridge—connects
the town, the little
boxes lit along
the cliffs. For love
the men awake
and cross
the bridge to labor
on their bombs
for love. For love
becomes a body
in the world. And fear.
A fear comes with it
to the world, a cry
in air burst first
from lungs. And grief,
the instant born,
the shape of what
will come, the shape
of what they’d seen. Become
then students of
the sun, to will that
fire here to burn. The bomb
makers always burned
with so much love—the father
pillars of my child self
in church who prayed
the sun to earth
to burn up
everything
for love. For love
-fused fear.
For grief.
from the book AFTER WE ALL DIED / Ahsahta Press
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Color image of the cover of Allison Cobb's book, After We All Died
What Sparks Poetry:
Allison Cobb on "For love"

"As a writer, I have been obsessed with the complexities of my origins, having been born and raised in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the town that built the first atomic bombs, and which remains the location of one of the nation’s three main nuclear weapons labs. Planetary legacies of damage and death stem from this place. How did this happen?"
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Black-and-white photograph of Adam Zagajewski sitting informally on a wall
Clare Cavanagh on Translating Adam Zagajewski

"He first approached me about working with him indirectly, by way of a mutual acquaintance who called to ask if I would consider translating Adam Zagajewski....He’d thought I would be some remote, imposing professor and was afraid to call me himself. This too continues to shock me. He was a great Polish poet after all, and I was just some Slavist in Wisconsin."

via THE WASHINGTON POST
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