haiku
White light, whirling cloud
Next a strange ghostly silence
Then startling black rain
Takeo
School was about to begin
for Takeo and his friends.
As they waited, they played
hide-and-seek. Takeo was It.
He covered his eyes and counted,
Ichi, ni,
Isan, shi . . .
A blinding light came. A roar. A vibration.
And after that, silence.
A soldier, searching for survivors,
heard his cries, dug through rubble,
found him, picked him up, carried him
through the silent, ruined city.
He heard his name. Takeo-san! Takeo-san!
“It’s my daddy!” he said to the soldier.
There, on the bridge, in the silence,
he was placed in his father’s arms.
Later, he remembered his father’s tears,
and how he had bowed to the soldier,
whispering, “Thank you,” over and over.
The Red Tricycle
Soon four years old! A big boy!
Shinichi Tetsutani
played that morning,
riding his red tricycle.
When his parents found him,
he was still gripping the
handlebar. He was so proud
of his red tricycle.
Shin-chan, they called him.
They buried him in the garden,
and with him, they buried
his red tricycle.
He had called it his friend.
Tomodachi.
Tram Girls
The country had been at war for a long time.
Most of the men had gone to serve.
Teenagers were called upon to fill their jobs.
High school girls learned to operate
the trams that moved through the city.
They felt useful and proud.
Schoolboys thought that Tram 101
had the best-looking girls.
They always waited for that one.
None of that mattered
when it happened—the bright light,
the explosion,
the engines fell silent.
Akira Ishida thought it was her fault,
that she had done something wrong,
caused an accident.
Then she looked to the street,
where crowds had been walking.
There was no one there. No one left.
They were vaporized.
She was a young girl with
a singed uniform, and
a lifetime
of nightmares.
Sadako Sasaki
Legend says that if you fold one thousand
paper cranes, a wish will be granted.
Sadako believed that.
She folded and folded.
She was two
on that August morning,
at home when the bomb fell,
and she seemed uninjured.
But the black rain fell on her,
carrying radiation.
She folded and folded,
there in the hospital.
She was twelve when she died,
surrounded by small paper birds.
Chieko Suetomo
Chieko survived.
Later, she found her doll,
the Shirley Temple doll that her father
had brought her from a trip to the USA.
The doll’s curls were singed,
her pink dress charred.
But her dimpled face
still smiled, unscarred.
The Tricycle
They had buried it with him,
the red tricycle
that he called his friend.
And forty years passed.
He was three.
Now he would be a man.
When his parents felt ready,
his father, old now, dug in the garden.
Gently they took his small bones
and moved them to a family grave.
His friend, the tricycle?
It rests now in a museum.
8:15, August 1945
Shinji Mikamo was helping his father
that morning.
He remembered that it was a hot day.
He was up on the roof.
He had raised his arm to wipe the sweat
from his forehead, when he saw
the blinding flash.
His father had just called to him
to stop daydreaming.
Was this part of a dream?
Then came a thundering roar,
and he was thrown under the collapsing house.
Two months later, at last
able to walk again, Shinji left
the hospital and made his way home,
looking for his father.
He never saw him again.
But he found, in the ruins,
his father’s watch. 8:15, it said.
Hiroshima
triolet
The cloud appeared over the distant hill,
blossoming like strange new flowers in spring,
opening, growing. But the world was still.
When the cloud appeared over the distant hill,
silence had fallen. There were no sounds until
rain came. Not true rain, but black drops falling
from the cloud that appeared over a distant hill,
blossoming like strange new flowers in spring.