The Day of the Mushroom Spore

It was only the shape of the mushroom cloud

That gave the game away,

It’s not that we weren’t expecting it,

It could happen any day,

But when it came on a Sunday as

We all trooped out of church,

We wondered, where was the Saviour,

Had he left us in the lurch?

By chance, the missile had missed the town

Fell thirty miles away,

Up in the distant ranges

In the vineyards of Cathay,

So much for the vintage of Semillon

I thought, with barely a frown,

Will anyone miss it once we’ve gone

And scorched that fertile ground?

It’s strange, with imminent death you feel

So suddenly detached,

Go in, and shelter from scorching heat

And shards of broken glass,

That’s all there was with the Cathay bomb

It fell so far away,

I looked at Jean and she looked at me

Was this our final day?

The sound came rumbling over the hill,

In a long, unbroken sigh,

I clung to her and she clung to me,

There wasn’t time to cry,

A moment passed and a moment more

And still we stood our ground,

I thought we might get to live some more

While God was looking down.

We’d lost our friends in the vineyards

They’d been vaporised to dust,

Jean said we’d better not think of it,

But I replied we must.

We both were seized with a single urge

As we clawed our way to bed,

And thought we couldn’t be doing this

If both of us were dead.

An eerie glow in the sky that night

Kept all of us awake,

We didn’t know where the bomb was from

Or what more we could take.

A second cloud in a mushroom stew

Rose up, there would be more,

From somewhere else where the evil grew,

The day of the mushroom spore.

David Lewis Paget