I HAVE BECOME THE DEATH NOW:award winner

I HAVE BECOME THE DEATH NOW: award winner


“I have become the Death now
The destroyer of worlds”.
Oppenheimer recalled these
Immortal divine words.

Commenting on destruction
That the Fat Man unleashed,
He did thus describe how the
Humanity did bleed.

These words were borrowed by him
From Gita, the Lord’s Word,
As Lord Krishna propounded
His message to the world.

In verse number thirty two
Of chapter eleven,
Krishna tells his disciple,
The warrior Arjun:

“Never to your actions, nor,
To their fruit you should cling.
Control only your actions,
Not the fruit they may bring.

This is the war of justice.
Men will be surely killed.
Death should not be grieved by those
Spiritually willed.

I have created the world
And I sustain it too.
I, too, am its destroyer.
It’s I who kills, not you.

Those who have been born are sure
To die, in fact, one day.
All this is predetermined,
Verily this I say.

So, Arjun, get up and do
Your duty, do not fear
The consequences I bring.
You are my pawn but mere”.


• Written in abcb, 7-6-7-6 format
• First prize winner in “The Poet's Fetish” contest, "Invalid Item" , Round 4.
• Fat Man was the second atomic bomb dropped in 1945 by US over Japan. (The first one was named Little Boy). The bomb was nick named Fat Man for its massive size, equivalent to one million tons of TNT. When the bomb was dropped, it caused such destruction that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man behind the Manhattan Project, commented, "I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita ... 'Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds".
The brief history of the above atomic bomb project and the above reaction of the man behind it on witnessing the dropping of the bomb is beautifully described at: http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa050300a.htm


M C Gupta
2 April 2007