‘Nuclear Warfare Risk at Highest Point in Decades, Secretary-General Warns Security Council.’ U.N. March 2024
Extract from a poem I wrote when visiting the city in 1989.
The sound of one bomb dropping
You can hear a pin drop as we shuffle past,
some abort this pilgrimage but witnesses remain:
a bronze buddha, half his face ripped away,
a granite buddha, features exfoliated,
streaks of rain blacken the white walls of Takusa,
a shadow sits on the steps of Sumitomo bank.
Photographs show faces recognised as faces by holes,
and the subsequent mutations, blood vessels
injecting long black tubular fingernails.
The grass grows green, the sky is undiminished blue.
A schoolboy is playing, ‘Oh, when the saints go marching in’
on harmonica, his friends crowd round him. The steel ribs
of the A Dome imprison and publicise the natural history,
the lovely name whispered, Hiroshima (stress the sheem) –
Screams vent from the rubble – TASUKETE KURE!
echoing, ‘If you would be so pleased, help me’.
Little Boy’s performance, his mission radiating
the loops of the Ota and Kyobashi, was exemplary.
With the testimonies of:
Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, died in Hiroshima in 1986 aged 77.
Dr Shuntaro Hida, died in 2017 aged 100.
Hideko Tamura (Friedman then Snider).
