Below Oklo
by Ken Hunt
Press your ear against a fossilized nautilus
to hear the hum of this natural reactor.
Below and before the colonial mines, before
there was fallout, bombs, or shelters,
there was a belly full of light, a lair
for balrogs, where a granular fuzz
of uranium crystals tickled the feet
of eyeless dryads, their skin embalmed
by stray ions. They once bathed
in pockets of superheated water trapped
in porous granite, fed on waves of heat
from muddled suns whose pungent rays
pickled the tissues of the earth. They drank
the brutal dew of Styx from crystal goblets,
redirecting rivulets to sustain their shrieking
stars, whose own songs cut with wild notes
sawed from infernal violins, each burst
of fission crumpling like a lantern as it drifts
into the maw of an ocean trench. Their lost
experiments predate us. Pandora’s box
unlocked itself, like a forgotten clock striking
in an empty house, clotting Oklo’s depths
with the chimes of crimson choirs, accompanied
by cruel buglers jealous of the swirling worms
above. Before our hominid ancestors tread,
sleepless, across savannahs sweet with primal
fears, restless veins of nuclear fuel blazed
in this georeactor, each Precambrian
burst the dream spasm of a body
of ore, a radionuclear twitch.
Neodymium dissolved, mired in aching
heat. Ruthenium threads unravelled
in the raving deep, decay particles caught
in sandstone, clay, and granite. Thermal
neutrons sundered the surrounding umber
stone of these hothouse catacombs.
Carcinogenic steam from Vulcan bathhouses
permeated troughs of liquid heat, where even
molecules boiled, nuclei evaporated. A visiting
necromancer brought all fossils near the reactor
back to life. Calcified skeletons cracked open their
stratified tombs to dance in the antechamber
of Earth’s first critical mass. Nature was never
innocent, entrapping hymns within black crystals,
testing her own flesh, carving with water trenches
for demoniac sparks, twisted fields tended to grow
the tectonic fauna of dark gardens: uraninite,
pitchblende, thorianite, pegmatite, betafte,
lost volumes from a mineralogical apocrypha.
The demise of the Anthropocene was written
in these stones. There was a revelation when
the mines opened, though the miracle was
merely material. Plunderers dove into the earth
for the spoils of new energy. The virus of humanity
prepared itself for omnicide, realizing that their
doomsday clocks were slower than they thought.
Below Oklo by Ken Hunt is a Blasted Tree original poem