Born in 1955, I've always been fascinated atomic and hydrogen bombs - Enitetok and Bikini loomed large over the cold war. My father, an Australian Navy man and later electrical engineer appears to have been, although we never discussed it - I have a book from his library called Atomic Challenge that I kept for my own, including B/W pictures.

I was prompted to write The Wanderer after reading a story called The Lost Leonardo by J.G. Ballard, from his collection The Terminal Beach. You can see my notes on the Wanderer to learn more about it, but little was borrowed from Ballard other than the particular name used for the "Wandering Jew". Ballard was a master of tales of apocalyptic landscapes: The Drowned Word, The Wind From Nowhere, The Drought, and many more, including his short story of the same title as the collection above. The Terminal Beach is a hypnotic meandering on Eniwetok by the protagonist. At one stage he encounters the corpse of a dead Japanese soldier from WW2. So I have leant a little bit on this framework of atoll/corpse and explosion and I acknowledge that here. The poem borrows heavily on what and how Ballard wrote (titled subsections, the corpse, etc.) The imagery is hopefully mostly my own. But consider it as a fairly tight homage to Ballard and his work. Without The Terminal Beach, this poem would never have been written.

The threat remains, as Kim Jong Un reminds us regularly.