Hiroshima Poems 2

Hiroshima Poems 2 I lived as best I could, and then I died. Be careful where you step: the grave is wide. -Michael R. Burch, "Epitaph for a Child of Hiroshima" The intense heat and light of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb blasts left behind ghostly silhouettes of human beings whose lives were erased in an instant: Hiroshima Shadows by Michael R. Burch Hiroshima shadows... mother and child... Oh, when will our hearts ever be beguiled to end mindless war... to seek peace, reconciled to our common mortality? Lucifer, to the Enola Gay by Michael R. Burch Go then, and give them my meaning so that their teeming streets become my city. Bring back a pretty flower, a chrysanthemum, perhaps, to bloom if but an hour, within a certain room of mine where the sun does not rise or fall, and the moon, although it is content to shine, helps nothing at all. There, if I hear the wistful call of their voices regretting choices made or perhaps not made in time, I can look back upon it and recall, in all its pale forms sublime, still Death will never be holy again. The day the Cloud reigned by Michael R. Burch The sky was clear on Hiroshima, sealing her fate. The report of the weather plane, neither early nor late, was certainly plain. The few innocuous clouds did not refrain from abandoning the city. Only the silence, monstrous in its complicity, regarding man’s error acknowledged the horror. Only the small, astonished victims understood the immaculate heavens: the inconceivable light igniting their bones; the Cloud, all of a sudden, billowing unbidden, and then the apocalyptic rain descending again and again. So that where white chrysanthemums had once whispered with bemused tongues instantly only ashen ruins remained the day the Cloud reigned. Let Us Be Midwives! by Hiroshima survivor Sadako Kurihara loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch Midnight... the basement of a shattered building... atomic bomb survivors sniveling in the darkness... not a single candle between them... the odor of blood... the stench of death... the sickly-sweet smell of decaying humanity... the groans... the moans... Out of all that, suddenly, miraculously, a voice: "The baby's coming!" In the hellish basement, unexpectedly, a young mother has gone into labor. In the dark, lacking a single match, what to do? Scrambling to her side, forgetting themselves... Keywords/Tags: Japan, Japanese, World War II, atomic bomb, nuclear war, Nagasaki, Hiroshima