‘Night

Imprisoned
By a myriad
Of lights from Hiroshima,
Pinpoints scratching my eyes.
Moist scar-folds winding
On the glossy keloid skin of puffed up tissue,
On the muddy street smelling of entrails
Floppy buds sprouting from seared trunks
Of trees along the avenue.
In depths of drizzle, a woman’s
Eyes grow redder than cigarette ends;
She does not seek to hide
the festering
Scab on her thigh.

Ah Hiroshima!
My virility
useless
The A-bomb has crushed it--
Desires gone impotent
In the night, the barren women,
The sperm lost in the dark.
The A-bomb Victims Inquiry Building
Looks pregnant, squatting
In the shadows of trees in
Hijiyama Park leased and glittering,
Its arc-lights eclipsed by the
Bright tail-lights
of American cars:
The placenta leaves the womb
While the tempo of Los Indios
Echos from the desert
Of New Mexico.

The trains,
their broken windows
Boarded up like
Blind eyes,
Rest under the station roof
Where even the news
(Coy tonight) blushes
At sunset, telling
Of a second, a third,
A hundredth A-bomb test.
Blood dripping
Down from somewhere a drunk
Comes staggering down
The dark riverbank
From out of a creaking barge
A gangling soldier suddenly rears up
The evening tide covers the footprints
Of scrap-iron scavengers
Stealing up from the sea.
Across the sky something swishes
Metallic blue like a moth
From night to dawn
From dawn to night again
Far hanging light
Caught before falling; and
Anxiously trying to forget
Lights like dropping fire-flies
Flickering light, dying light,
The lights ofHiroshima
Dragging blood, seond by second
Drawing away from that day
Seeping up from nowhere.
In the darkness of History
The lights of Hiroshima
Teem quietly below.’

--Toge Sankichi