GRGR31: Hiroshima

[jbor]

On the Shadow of a Japanese Child 
Blasted upon a Wall after the Dropping of
an Atomic Bomb in 1945

Her parents speak:
We thought -- when you were young there'd be
the usual things:
the time of toys, of dolls with black fringed hair,
and pull-along wooden ducks . . .
the time of pets, white mice on treadmills,
a canary in a bamboo cage, trilling of freedom,
a pet cricket . . .
the time of dresses with silken sashes,
with bows at the waist, when looking in shop-windows
can easily consume all day, and not be ended at nightfall . . .
and then -- the time of boys,
when dreaming is a continuous newsreel
and even the stern battle for the first home-islands
would be just a distant mutter of thunder
that the sidelong glance of a boy in a classroom
could make one easily forget . . .

We thought -- Oh so many things . . . while the sky flared
over Honshu
and the young *Kamikaze kichigai* with their cherry blossom scarves
                                  and the farewell *sake* on their lips
went out never to return
-- but, on the morning in question,
high in the heavens over our city,
a single plane loosed a single bomb,
and all those things which might have been reasonably expected
became suddenly phantasmal,
including you, our beloved daughter,
even though now, in your blackened absence,
this stencilled outline on the wall
haunts us all with its unending play . . .

Bruce Dawe