Two War Poems

AFTER BASHŌ

Chalk white moon, a disc of pooling light.

Round old pond, stillness unruffled,

Bird tucked inward. Behind

Embankment of clouds, a frog leaps—

Touchdown in water!

Black sky bursts, broken,

Beatific placid mirror shattered

By splash of a big blast,

Droplets, tremulous,

Subatomic particles scattering,

Tsunami unleashing gamma waves, X-rays,

70,000 instantly dead…

Genbaku Dome, UNESCO World Heritage Site.

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

B-29 That Dropped the Atom Bomb on Hiroshima