When you hear church bells tolling on the morning of Aug. 6, listen carefully. They have an important message for you.

In 1624, English cleric and poet John Donne published a series of poems, including “No Man is an Island.” Donne lived and wrote at a time when people lived in scattered cottages, and the main source of community was centered in the village churches, where people gathered for weekly sermons, marriages, christenings and deaths. It was the church bells that called people from their far-off farms, and the different sounds of those bells which told whether they rang for joy or tolled for sorrow.

Donne’s poem teaches a lesson to us today. We live on an earth divided into political sides which compete for control over the resources all living beings need to exist, instead of working together to share in their use and protection. Our continued massive investment in preparation for war has rendered us (almost) incapable of uniting to face the twin existential threats of a climate crisis and nuclear war; we must change to prevent those threats from ending life on earth.

Donne’s poem uses the composition of the earth as a metaphor for humankind’s place on it: “No man is an island, even unto itself/ Each is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” Then it explains the metaphor’s significance for each person living on earth: “Each man’s death diminishes me/ For I am involved in mankind.” Finally, it ends with the lesson for us to understand if we are to wake up and change our present course: “And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”

On Aug. 6, Hiroshima Day, churches and town halls in the area will be tolling their bells at the time the nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima — the morning that the school children were out of school clearing the streets in preparation for the expected evacuation. As Shigeko Sassamori, one of the survivors, described it, “It was a beautiful day with blue skies, and it was quiet as a plane flew through the clouds …” and later, after she recovered in the darkness, she joined the crowds of people moving toward the river for relief for their burns.

Scientific reports now show that even a nuclear war involving the lesser nuclear powers would result in enough soot from the explosions and endless fires being sent into the stratosphere to block the sun’s rays and result in a nuclear winter, when no crops would grow, humans and animals would compete for what was left, and famine would spread throughout the world.

The danger of nuclear war is very great, but we are not helpless in the face of this existential threat. The countries of the world know how to dismantle the 12,500 nuclear warheads that threaten us — more than 50,000 have already been dismantled. The Back from the Brink campaign, which is advanced here in the Valley by its Western Massachusetts Hub — provides a path to a world free of nuclear weapons. (http://www.PreventNuclearWar.org). 

The church bells on Aug. 6 will be tolling for those in Hiroshima who lost their lives in the blast or in the radiation that followed. And they sound a warning to all of us at a time when we are closer to nuclear war than we have ever been. As each bell tolls, remember what John Donne told us, “it tolls for thee.

Bruce J. Stedman is a member of the Western Massachusetts Hub of the national Back from the Brink campaign which works to reduce the risk of nuclear war and abolish nuclear weapons. He lives in Amherst.