Hiroshima Bomb
Confetti spirals flutter into dark green.
Cousin Mary and her Bachan
stand on the Hiroshima pier.
Horns blare as the last steamship
pulls away before the war,
separating her from mom and dad.
In her black and white
grammar school girl uniform,
Mary looks Japanese.
American gait draws
every neighbor’s stare,
gaijin, foreigner.
Return to Sender letters
from America.
Bachan seeks a temple psychic:
Mary’s parents are well in a hot
and desolate place.
Razor points at intervals
confine thousands.
A gourd of death
will tumble from blue
Hiroshima skies.
No chance to scream,
glass shards explode,
flesh burns,
no chance to breathe.
Victorious Americans will
toss chocolate to orphans.
Your outstretched palm
will catch nothing.
Mary rides the Tokyo express
through Hiroshima after the bomb.
Blinds pulled tight, sunlight
seeps through cracks.
Twenty US army soldiers
rise wordlessly,
khaki garrison
caps cover hearts.
In silence they kneel,
fill the aisle, heads bowed
as if in church.
Mary slides to the window,
peeks and raises the curtain
to a bleached moonscape of
stacked and mangled heaps.
School boy in gray underwear
pulls a red wagon against the wind,
his fluttering oil-skin umbrella
whips inside out, tearing parchment from spines
in the feted horizontal rain.
