From 'The Shadow Of Cain' (1947) By Edith Sitwell

Inspired by eyewitness descriptions of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. The Shadow of Cain, the first of the poems, was about "the fission of the world into warring particles, destroying and self-destructive. It is about the gradual migration of mankind, after that Second Fall of Man . . . into the desert of the Cold, towards the final disaster, the first symbol of which fell on Hiroshima." The poem's imagery was, she explained, "partly a physical description of the highest degree of cold, partly a spiritual description of this."


There came a roar as if the sun and earth had come together
The sun descending and the earth ascending
To take its place above... the Primal Matter

Was broken, the womb from which all life began

Then to the murdered sun a modern totem pole of dust arose

In memory of man.