Poem of the Week | November 11, 2024

“₈₆Rn :: { Radon :: Rodan }” by Rosebud Ben-Oni is our Poem of the Week.

Rosebud Ben-Oni is the author of several collections of poetry, including If This is the Age We End Discovery (2021), which won the Alice James Award and was a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Paramount commissioned her video essay “My Judaism is a Wild Unplace” for a national media campaign for Jewish Heritage Month, and her poem “Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark” was commissioned by the National September 11th Memorial. She performed at Carnegie Hall on International Holocaust Memorial Day as part “We Are Here: Songs from The Holocaust.” Most recently, her poem “When You Are the Arrow of Time” was commissioned and filmed by the Museum of Jewish Heritage— A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. In 2023, she received a Café Royal Cultural Foundation grant to write The Atomic Sonnets, a full-length collection based on her chapbook 20 Atomic Sonnets (Black Warrior Review, 2020), which she began in honor of the Periodic Table’s 150th Birthday in 2019. She has received grants from the New York Foundation of the Arts, Queens Arts Fund, Queens Council for the Arts, and CantoMundo. Her work appears in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Poetry Society of America (PSA), Poetry Review (UK), Poetry Wales, Poetry Daily, and Tin House, among others.

₈₆Rn :: { Radon :: Rodan }

                                                —for Diane Seuss

How many incarnations: wide-eyed hatchling, your sonic winds laying waves,
               waste,
to delicious sundays of high heel escapes & fields of cattle graze, falling
               cities, all
to find the second Radon :: Rodan, who’d rather die in the end
               with her mate—
eruption, lava, ablaze. Mind your miners, Mount Aso never
               the same, pyre bird,
phoenix, deliverance of flame, God lightspeed, millennium
               monster & let’s get one
thing straight: Never were you a dinosaur but mirror
               to namesake: radioactive, rapid decay, rare

                                               & yet everywhere in the air you bequeathed, our very
                                            genes— you, shining emanation, our evolutionary leap—
 

Author’s Note

In the 1956 Japanese film Radon (changed to Rodan for English-speaking audiences), we first meet the namesake Pteranodon, who is by classification not a dinosaur but a large flying reptile of the pterosaur genus from the Cretaceous period. The film itself shortens Pteranodon to Radon, which also alludes to the element’s radioactive properties. Radon (as in the element) was discovered by Friedrich Ernst Dorn, who first referred to it as “emanation” coming off the decay chain of its main source, radium. Renamed as “niton” (after the Latin nitens, for “shining”), it was finally renamed radon in 1923. Radon, like radium, is rare in nature and its isotopes short-lived—yet it’s prevalent (in low levels) in the air we breathe, which is considered safe. (When it builds up in homes and wells—that’s another matter.) It’s now suspected that the element played a hand in evolution as it’s needed for genetic alterations and adaptations. Radon is a perfect name for this kaiju, who in the film finds a second of its kind, only to perish in lava, and is soon joined by its would-be mate. But like my affection for this plucky Pteranodon, Radon-Rodan comes back over and over, continually rises from the ashes in other Godzilla films.