Seventy-Five Years After

Her name was Hideko and she was ten
when we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.
She said she was the happiest child,
reading a book in her home,
looking up on a sunny day
to notice butterflies in the garden,
when in her peripheral vision,
it flashed blue-white.
Then a deafening sound, so huge, she said,
so huge I had never ever heard
a sound so huge, resounding.
She tried to hang on to furniture
but the shaking and wind so violent,
and everything hitting me, she said,
even as she tried to wedge between
heavy pieces of furniture.
Pitch dark, she could not see anything.
I did not pass out, I wish I had, she said.
I remember the sensation the color the smell
like yesterday, she said, 75 years later.
The sound went on in the pitch black,
Ten, fifteen minutes. When it subsided,
she found herself under debris, immobile,
She made herself crawl.
When she came to outside, she found
enormous shards of glass stuck in her leg.
She was an only child, used to being helped.
Auntie help me she cried. Auntie was not able.
Uncle was screaming, It’s the end, the end,
glass sticking out from his throat,
from all over his body, bleeding.
Uncle was not able.
Hideko with trembling hands,
picked the huge shards from her leg.
The last day of my childhood,
she said it was.
The heat of radiation so strong,
heat that melts steel but multiplied,
so multiplied, she said.
She saw her block full of flame.
She saw they would be burned to death
if they did not escape.
She remembered her mother’s
wartime instructions
to hide under furniture, and if she survived,
to save herself in the river.

The last Hideko saw her mother,
part of the building was falling on her,
screaming under heavy concrete,
then buried alive, burned alive.
Barely thirty years of age,
so loving, her beautiful mother.
Hideko headed to the river.
In front of the gate were women
reaching out to me, these first
people I saw on the ground
were bleeding, crawling, reaching.
Raising their hands, begging for help.
I was a child, I could do nothing,
I was needing help too.
The long day of fleeing,
watching the city burn all night,
feeling stunned, stunned.

Then the radiation sickness.
I was covered in boils,
high fever, my hair falling out,
between life and death for many weeks.
Then the jaundice.
My eyes were yellow my skin
no longer golden but sick yellow.
Too tired to move, I only could
sit day after day and stare.
Others had thyroids swelling swelling.
Many had bleeding from every opening,
many had the red or purple spots all over.
Family could only recognize
those who slept on radiated ground
by their voices, maybe a special hairpin.

My cousin, like a brother,
I loved him so much,
was at Ground Zero
with eight thousand classmates.
They were running, one
recognized the shape of my cousin’s head.
Is it you? he said.
My cousin’s clothes burned off,
his skin hanging in peels,
his classmate helped him run
after the explosion.
A procession of ghost children
who didn’t look human
learned to step over
dead bodies, and dying humans
who could only whisper, Water,
please, Water.
Thousands and thousands
of others never
could be recognized by kin,
because the flash
had melted them into air,
the bomb from the US of A
had vaporized
their very flesh.

My cousin died, my mother died,
my uncle and aunt and father died.
I lived. I lived.
I think I lived to tell you.
Do you know it’s good to cry?
Do you know that tears
flush out stress, restore
emotional balance?
I think the General who ordered the bomb
never allowed himself to cry.
I think the ones who choke back tears
make the violence in the world.
If all of us let tears flow,
what wellness could fall on our Earth
as the rain falls from heaven,
watering the soil.
Imagine a culture, a world
restored to emotional balance.
Does my story make you sad?
Embrace your weeping,
your sacred, healing weeping.
I have lived to tell you this.

©Susa Silvermarie 2020