The BlueIris Semi-Nightly Poetry Break, 8/7/08 (warning: extremely graphic language)

[BlueIris]

"At the Makeshift Aid Station"

You girls—
weeping even though there is no place
for your tears to come from;
crying out even though you have no lips to shape the words;
struggling even though you have no skin
on your fingers to grasp anything with—
you girls.

Your limbs twitch, oozing blood and greasy sweat and lymph;
your eyes, puffed to slits, glitter whitely;
only the elastic bands of your panties hold in
your swollen bellies;
you are wholly beyond shame even though your private parts
are exposed:
who could think
that a little while ago
you all were pretty schoolgirls?

Emerging from the flames flickering gloomily
in burned-out Hiroshima
no longer yourselves,
you rushed out, crawled out one after the other,
struggled along to this grassy spot,
in agony laid your heads, bald but for a few wisps of hair.
on the ground.
Why must you suffer like this?
Why must you suffer like this?
For what reason?
For what reason?
You girls
don't know
how desperate your condition,
how far you have been transformed from the human.

You are simply thinking,
thinking
of those who until this morning
were your fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters
(would any of them know you now?)
and of the homes in which you slept, woke, ate
(in that instant the blossoms in the hedge were torn off;
now even their ashes are not to be found)

thinking, thinking—
as you lie there among friends who one after the other
stop moving—
thinking
of when you were girls,
human beings.

—Toge Sankichi
(Translated from the Japenese by Richard H. Minear)

[ThomCat]

1. Wow.

:(

And our foreign policy is still just as brutal, still targetting civilians, and still not recognizing all the harm we have done.

This should be read by highschool students, and explained to them, presented with photos so that they'll get past the patriotic mythologies and understand the real brutality that has been committed in our names.

This is horrific.

[BlueIris]

2. I had a sad experience while searching for postable poetry about Hiroshima/Nagasaki.

There isn't that much of it. Or, at least, not that much that I consider thoughtful or well-crafted. The world still has a real blind spot when it comes to the Bomb.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

3. My dear BlueIris...

Omigod...

This is truly beautiful and awful, all at once...

Thank you...

:cry:

[BlueIris]

4. Thanks, C-Peg. nt

[Rabrrrrrr]

5. Visiting Hiroshima was one of the most god-awful/inspiring experiences of my life

To think that human beings would actually use such a device - makes me ashamed.

And to think that we still have tens of thousands of them waiting to be used - even worse.

[BlueIris]

6. What is shocking to me (though it shouldn't be) is that

people are still dying premature deaths and suffering horrible disease as a result of the damage done by the Hiroshima/Nagasaki detonations.