I was very affected by the accident and became involved in the anti-nuke movie. I am a poet and have been writing for a long time. This was written in 1979.
Imaginary Sirens
April 4, 1979
wake me in the night,
make me sit straight up in bed
scared
as I have never been.
Some nights there are
real sirens as a drill.
Some nights they wake me from
evacuation nightmares,
crowds dying
in and out of cars.
I convince myself I am okay,
and this is days after men with
Southern accents say the crisis is over,
radiation levels are normal.
This is twenty years before my kidney cancer,
before I wondered about us having mutant cells
or forever mutant lives.
Barbara Buckman Strasko