THE DAY THE CLOCK STOPPED
Nagasaki,
Japan
The day the
clock stopped,
Those whose
names had been inscribed
In the Book
of Death,
Thursday,
August 9, 1945,
In one
instant, they no longer existed.
Unspooling,
life had unwound, desultory worm.
They were working
in the field, grinding at the mill…
One was
taken, another left.
The schoolboy
sitting on the steps vaporized in a single burst of a thousand white flashes,
his existence now only a memory fired in cement…
The factory
worker, blown backward and upward against the wall, falling to the floor and
under a fallen pillar, her skull cracking open like an egg, the huge roof
blasted away entirely…walls collapsing inward, exposing a wasteland trodden
completely flat by a hurricane foot…
The postman
upswept, smashed downward, his bicycle twisting into a pretzel… sloughing off,
his skin melting like cheese under extreme heat…swelling to twice its normal
size, his face, eyes pinched closed…blood streaming out of his ears and nose,
bubbling frothily from his mouth…his belly split open, intestines welling up
like rice boiling in a pot…
The
schoolteacher sucked out from inside the door, swung violently against an
exploded tree…her eyes pushed out like pendant cherries…unmoving now, her dead
body a white potato ball, peelings uncurling, red flesh showing
underneath…sitting in a welter of picks, fire hooks, shovels, houses like
fallen chairs, cadavers like charring logs…
The soldier
still standing, petrified, blackened, his uniform fully burned away…smoldering
amidst steel frames bereft of walls, smashed furniture, roof tiles like
confetti, telegraph poles snapped in two, dangling electric cables, twisted
train tracks, smoking corpses igniting spontaneously into flame…or bloated,
purplish, popping up and out of the water…
The mother
nursing her child when the window burst, peppering her with glass buckshot,
spearing her fatally through the eye…her last glimpse, thick, heavy black and
yellow smoke drawn upward into a geyser of smoke and dust rising rapidly into
the dense sky…the sun a reddish-brown disc…
A
broken clock retrieved by survivors had been memorialized—
Crystal of
human intelligence, a living stone, ticking when the atomic shockwave had
folded it in two,
Today it
hangs in a glass display—a statue unperturbed by tumult, finality of a royal
emblem, for all practical purposes, inert.
For Tetsuya
Koshiishi
Broken Wall Clock, Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, Japan |
“The Day the Clock Stopped” was originally published in vox poetica (March 7, 2020).
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