Original Child Bomb: Points for Meditation to Be Scratched on the Walls of a Cave

by Thomas Merton

Year 1962
Type Poem
Genre poetry
Tradition Catholic
Original language English

For For readers of his anti-war writing; a short prose-poem on the atomic bombing of Japan, read in a sitting.

Should I read this?

For the general reader: 3 of 5 worth your time
For the researcher: 3 of 5 worth your time
Difficulty: 1 of 5 light

A prose-poem in numbered points on the making and dropping of the first atomic bomb, flat in tone and bitter in effect.

How it proceeds

Philosophic 1 of 5
Scriptural 1 of 5
Experiential 2 of 5
Sociological 4 of 5
Historical 4 of 5

Independent intensities, 0–5 — what the work is made of, not how good it is.

A short prose-poem published by New Directions in New York in 1962 (23 pages), in numbered "points for meditation" that recount, in deliberately flat documentary language, the decision to build and drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. It belongs to the period of his writing against nuclear war that his superiors restricted in 1962. It is included in The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton (1977).

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Catalog IDW.M4S15P.R

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