Variations on poems by Sadako Kurihara, 1913-2005

 

City of fire, city of death, 

the sky tonight

 

has blanketed your bones

in blue and gaudy red –

 

as if the autumn 

deepened, even so.

 

~

 

I remember 

a rush of light, high up, 

a weird white haze descending, 

 

and then 

a leering cloud of heat,

prickling my eyes and skin,

 

the angry sky an engine

dripping flame. My 

heartbeat blinked

 

to see 

the house ripped out, 

the street undone, a clamour 

 

taking shape 

as the cavalcade of trucks 

began to pass, piled up 

 

with lurching bodies, 

blistering and burnt.

A wall collapsed 

 

within me, when I turned  

to find my tiny children – 

terrified, transfixed, 

 

clung like vines 

against my either side. 

 

~

 

Days later, 

sown among the rubble:

the garish eyes of agony, agog.

 

~

 

My wounded heart knows all there is 

of loneliness – 

 

in this, our age of desolation, 

the world an echo 

 

clattering 

in a derelict asylum.

 

~

 

To the baby 

born in a bunker 

the midnight after: 

 

you survived 

by luck and desperation.

Crushed together

 

in the steaming room, 

the wounded smelt of sweat, 

their groaning 

 

like a boat of rust, in pain.

The air was hardly 

breathable. Your grieving 

 

mother fell; somebody 

held her head. A havoc 

filled the air – until 

 

a mutilated woman

raised an arm. I can help, 

she sighed. And set to work. 

 

I still recall your feral cry.

In the morning, 

the burning midwife died.

 

~

 

In the wake 

of the catastrophe,

 

the speculators 

crashed in waves 

 

on every gleaming shore.  

Their rabid racket 

 

gripped the land, 

leaving villages 

 

up-ended, ancient 

boundaries askew.

 

Market-mad, 

mendacious, they waged 

 

a kind of war on life, 

insatiable as gulls. 

 

~

 

Snowed in, snowed under, 

a brutal brick 

in a field of snow,

 

my bony body yearns

for one thing only – 

peace of mind. 

 

~

 

I would trudge

the winter mountains,

 

wade among the river-rocks

in churning spring

 

to find her – 

the one now dead,

 

Ohara Rinko,  

where is she? 

 

~

 

From walled-up chambers, contaminated lots,

as the seething winter rivers hiss,

 

oh bird of bliss, take wing, take wing...

I long to hear your whisper 

shadowing the spring.

 

~

 

My hand on the brow

of the ashen child,

 

too sick to know 

the night from day – 

 

the fever softly 

pulsing in his veins.

 

~

 

I think often 

of the grey-faced soldier, also,

 

beaten

with a horse-whip

for refusing to obey.

 

~

 

So lonely, this darkness

crying with field-crickets. 

 

~

 

Star season:

a sky-rich vision

nightly, barely seen,

 

like a dream we wake 

believing in:

intimate, impalpable, 

 

luminously certain.

 

~

 

And I remember, too, 

becoming conscious

 

of a love welled up inside

so deep 

 

the very air 

could set me tingling – 

 

a sing-song voice 

in every limb, 

 

whistling, Amen!

 

~

 

As the cunning carnival goes on 

of ferocity and greed, 

I turn instead

 

to the patch out back, 

where a clump of lush 

tomato plants

 

is worshipping the sun.

 

~

 

At the end 

of everything,

 

love itself

like an autumn dusk,

 

the deepest rivulets 

in flux,

 

our mingled 

breaths atremble.

 

~

 

Hell, Hiroshima,  

capital of soot –

 

smoky flowers

shining in the char.