MARIE CURIE REMEMBERS RADIUM
Dew on periwinkles
fireflies
moon-bathed high plateau
Pierre in a French window
eyes clear with abandon
dreamer lost
in his reflections.
Light always lured me.
How can it surprise you
I was seduced
a gram of blue glow
coaxed from tons of pitchblende?
I tell you the instant of my calling:
uranium salts kept in dark for months
and black paper shrouded
exposed a photographic plate.
You assume
that radioactivity's escape
from the shroud fascinated a girl
who had lost her mother too young--
a girl, who even before the hacking cough,
noted her mother's avoidance
of kiss
or even an embrace.
Don't. As much as I mourned
and stiffened to others' touch
and even banished God
I tell you
a glass case, graceful instruments,
amber, silk, the gold-leaf electroscope;
I must have been only five
yet, I remember my father's tools.
Yes
light always lured me.
