It was Rutherford in 1899
who claimed her as his own
her existence and half-life
confined to a basement
an unsafe emanation
otherwise not there.
Unstable, he called her
rarer than any other
but dangerous, to be guarded
against, like an exhaled curse
or barely luminescent ghost
a haunting Typhoid Mary.
And so he trapped her there
by permafreezing time
–like an insect in amber–
a trophy to his boast
of her radioactive power
made visible, on display.
Yet the sciences of man
–ambition, war and grief–
cracked the very Earth
in a seismic release:
and in the hair-trigger cascade
she finally slipped away.
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A J Dalton (www.ajdalton.eu) is a UK-based writer. He’s published the Empire of the Saviours trilogy with Gollancz Orion, The Satanic in Science Fiction and Fantasy with Luna Press, the Dark Woods Rising and Green Man Ascendant poetry collections with Starship Sloane, and other bits and bobs. He lives with his monstrously oppressive cat named Cleopatra. |
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