What Have They Done To The Rain?

Help! he shrieked shrilly in a voice strangling in its own emotion, as the policemen carried him to the open doors in the rear of the ambulance and threw him inside. Police! Help! Police! The doors were shut and bolted, and the ambulance raced away. There was a humorless irony in the ludicrous panic of the man screaming for help to the police while policemen were all around him. Yossarian smiled wryly at the futile and ridiculous cry for aid, then saw with a start that the words were ambiguous, realized with alarm that they were not perhaps, intended as a call for police but as a heroic warning from the grave by a doomed friend to everyone who was not a policeman with a club and gun and a mob of other policemen with clubs and guns to back him up. Help! Police! the man had cried, and he could have been shouting of danger.
--Joseph Heller
Catch-22

Fallout from the March 2011 Fukushima Nuclear Reactor Incident

What if a dawn of a doom of a dream
bites this universe in two,
peels forever out of his grave,
and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?
--E.E. Cummings

Joan Baez: What Have They Done to the Rain?

just a little rain
falling all around
the grass lifts its head
to the heavenly sound
just a little rain
just a little rain
what have they done
to the rain?

just a little boy
standing in the rain
the gentle rain
that falls for years
and the grass is gone
the boy disappears
and rain keeps falling
like helpless tears
and what have they done to the rain?

just a little breeze out of the sky
the leaves pat their hands as the breeze blows by
just a little breeze with some smoke in its eye
what have they done to the rain?

just a little boy standing in the rain
the gentle rain that falls for years
and the grass is gone
the boy disappears
and rain keeps falling like helpless tears
and what have they done to the rain?

--Malvina Reynolds
What Have They Done to the Rain?

I will love you
as the iceberg
loves the ship,
and the passengers
love the lifeboat
and the lifeboat
loves the teeth
of the sperm whale,
and the sperm whale
loves the flavor
of naval uniforms.
--Lemony Snicket
The Beatrice Letters