The Unforgettable Fire: (Hiroshima, August 6th,1945) Poem by DM W

It began with a flash brighter than the sun.
Everything was instantly
Covered with pink and blue rays.
There were strange whooshing sounds,
And then the black rain came down in torrents.
The mushroom cloud emerged from beyond the horizon:

Burning pine trees, torn breasts;
Burned down electric power lines;
Fragments of broken window glass;
Dead people, dead horses, cats and pigs;
Tomatoes, pumpkins, watermelons;
Egg plants scattered across the fields and roads.

Screams of despair
Amidst the driving wind and rain:
'Please help this child!
Someone please help this child.
Please help. Someone please!
Please give us water.'


The skin of her hands was swollen,
Burned and hanging down.
A piece of wood was protruding
Out of her right eye. And she seemed to be
In great pain. She was given a cucumber
Which she held with her left hand.
Perhaps she wondered in her desperation
If spring would ever return again.

Skin of girl's hip was hanging down.
The sight of a living horse burning
Was was very striking. Blood was spurting out
Of the top ofthe man'shead
His clothes were torn from his back
And his skin was trailing.

Another man, stark naked. standing
With his eyeball in his palm.
A woman with her jaw missing
And her tongue hanging out;
Wandered around in the heavy, black rain.
Perhaps she wondered if she would see another day


The last moments of a mother and child
Too heartbreaking to cast a glance.
Their blood spattered faces
Swollen and burnt;
Crushed in water bucket
Revealed a horror in blue and black.

Corpses of girls
Collected on the river bank;
Where they once wandered.
The child's head looked like a boiled octopus.
His eyes were half closed.
And his mouth was white, pursed and swollen.

She looked like a ghost
Because her eyelids were
So badly burned and swollen.
Her lips, swollen and protruding
Made her mouth look like a monkey's.
Although she was under mosquito netting,
The skin of her whole body.
On which maggots were breeding,
Had the appearance of the crust of a crab
Her face was all splinters of glass.


The corpse lying on its back had
Certainly been killed instantly.
When the A - Bomb was dropped.
Its hand was lifted to the sky.
And the fingers were burning with blue flames.
The fingers were shortened
To one - third and distorted.
A dark liquid was running to
The ground along the hand.
This hand must have embraced
His wife and children before
The great, unholy cloud appeared.

Fires burned with such fury
That they created wind storms.
Black radioactive rain:
Thosewho in desperation drank it
Doomed themselvesto an agonizing death.
Hell on earth:no other way to describe it.
Dante could not have dreamt of greater horrors. 
Bodies charred completely black.
A slow parade of fevered ghosts
With eyes melting in their sockets.
Maggots moving in their wounds;
Melted skin dripping off fingers.

Buildings turned into grey ashes
Corpses in cisterns and rivers
Floating down stream; bobbing up
And slipping under the surface like radishes.

Black rain kept falling
A pile of blackened bodies
Had been gathered from the nearby ruins.
They were being cremated
One after another on the river- bank.
Would cherry blossoms ever return?

A young boy, four or five years old,
Was burned black, lying on his back,
Like a discarded porcelain doll.
His arms were pointing to heaven,
I wonder if the angels retrieved
And raised up his trembling spirit.