© 2004  Louis Daniel Brodsky

Hiroshima

He never saw it coming,

Never dreamed it could strip away his flesh,

Expose his bones, in a solitary rolling flash

Of momentary incandescence,

To the glowing loneliness of atomic radiation.

He never heard the reverberation of its engines —

The groaning Enola Gay,

Droning its way across the ocean, to his home —

Never was taught in school

To anticipate such evil kamikaze breezes,

Never imagined a haiku tsunami

Could ignite so ferocious a firestorm,

Liquefying glass, steel, cast iron,

Flattening, in a matter of seconds, minutes,

His entire beloved city.

If anyone had asked him about Hirohito,

The destiny of the Rising Sun,

He would have dropped to his knees,

Kissed the ground, sipped sake,

And sworn the future would be glorious.

But then came the United States,

With all its raw, able-bodied energy

Packed into a single bomb,

Which brought Japan to its knees

To kiss its burned dirt, drink its blood, curse its past.

Fifty-six years later,

His ghost trudges through Hiroshima,

Searching for pieces of his ashen soul

Beneath its repaved streets.

But all he finds are other groping ghosts.

All work is property of Louis Daniel Brodsky.

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