Anthropology: Hiroshima
For Aiko
August 6th, 1945
Orange sky, black rain:
On the way home, thirty minutes from Kure to Hiroshima,
I heard through the trees, sirens scream and wail.
On the clear August day before, white leaflets fell like gifts
from the sky, warning our people not to leave the city.
They fell in paper clouds the citizens ignored.
We held hostage no American POWs.
We were the innocent victims of an endless rage.
Today people release hundreds of paper lanterns on the Motoyasu River
beside Genbaku Dome written with calligraphy
bearing the names of our dead.
Orange sky, black rain:
“Little Boy” falls from the Enola Gay into the morning sky.
The force – twenty thousand tons of dynamite.
The target – Aioi Bridge.
One hundred forty thousand perish in an instant.
Orange sky, black rain:
Overhead the flash of a strained lightning violated
the morning. In my ears the roar of thunder.
I, Kiyoshi Yoshikawa, covered my eyes and trembling fell
into a ditch as the searing heat of one hundred morning suns
scorched my back and spine.
Orange sky, black rain:
August 3rd, 1951, six years later.
I, now hibakusha, opened a modest souvenir stand
Near Genbaku Dome and sold penny postcards of Hiroshima
on the day of the atomic blast.
Now seventy-five years later,
people fold
one thousand paper cranes, drop them
from our tallest buildings and pray for peace.
—–
Beauty
How do our eyes speak of beauty?
Beauty was born in a lonely Chinatown hotel room
where I dreamt of a thousand love letters.
Dolce, dolce, dolcissimo.
Soft whispers of your passion delight in my ear.
With gratitude I acknowledge your every complaint:
“The year was not quite enough long.” “December has arrived.”
“Each month ended before our essential tasks were done.”
We test the spirited weight of our language.
Strong as your muscles, with permission to feel the pull, the heft,
our bodies are lifted to the skies.
Sunlight breaks against the walls of our room.
Soon someday this room will be emptied,
and our voices echo from these bare walls.
No one listened to me unless I sang.
Less I gave up to them a kind of vital music,
or spoke out of our sleep’s nearly forgotten dreams,
or danced.
You captured me before we fell.
We always will triumph said my final letter:
our love will prevail.
——
Poetry (c) Beth Brown Preston
Image: Pixabay geralt