8 Moons

An atom bomb—does it reduce everything
to atoms—to a mist the size of the moon?
And the hydrogen bomb—is there water in it?
When you drop it, does the mushroom above it
look like a splash, as if you’d dropped
the moon onto the ocean? If you dropped
the moon onto the Pacific, would the moon’s
circumference fit? Some say the equators of
8 moons dropped onto the surface
of the Pacific would fit on it.
We can’t imagine the length of time
it took to make the universe.
And the death of the Earth—for most of us,
unimaginable, and therefore
inevitable. As if each parent,
at the same moment, will see our offspring
atomized, our species’ clouds
lifting off the globe, the huge, childless atom.