This month marks the solemn 80th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the first and only time nuclear weapons have been used in war. In 1962, Trappist monk and social justice and peace activist Thomas Merton published the prose poem, “Original Child Bomb,” the title using a rough translation of the root characters in the Japanese term for “atom.” This work inspired the searing 2004 documentary with the same name.

Merton subtitled his “anti-poem” “Points for meditation to be scratched in the walls of a cave,” and it consists of a numbered list of 41 comments on the bomb’s creation, the decision to drop the first bomb on Hiroshima and the aftermath, including these:

“3: President Truman formed a committee of men to tell him if this bomb would work, and if so, what he shou

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