Poem from Nuclear Winter: Poetry for the Apocalypse

Dear Santa, please hurry here.
Our daughter Marie is only four
but her logic is as clear
as midnight broken by the searing light
of the bomb blast.
She’s afraid you aren’t coming
because the shelter has no chimney,
only an air vent to filter out death.
She smiled a little when we told her
she’d join you in heaven.
But the morphine is almost gone and
she won’t be able to smile much longer.
–a woman Puget Sound North America

~ Stephen Daniel Mings

Dear Santa from Stephen Daniel Mings’ Nuclear Winter: Poetry for the Apocalypse (1986)

A collection of Forty-Three poems written from the perspective of global nuclear war survivors.