Book of the Week: Silent Silos: a counterBOMB haiku sequence

Our Book of the Week is Silent Silos: a counterBOMB haiku sequence, by the late Johnny Baranski. No one can fail to note the irony of calling underground, ballistic missile towers ‘silos’, after silage containers. In these poems, Johnny exploits this contrast between the peaceful and destructive connotations of ‘silo’ to its extremes. During his long life, Baranski also walked the walk, spending time in prison for demonstrating his anti-nuclear beliefs, an experience that gave him one of the major themes for his writing.

Missile silos —
about them the farmer
harrowing the soil

A crop duster
coming in on the wheatfield
missile silos

Nuclear missile —
the face of the enemy
is my own

You can read the entire book in the THF Digital Library.

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Haiku featured in the Book of the Week Archive are selected by THF Digital Librarian Garry Eaton, and are used with permission