Subject:
A White Road
Date: June
14, 1995 21:06
- A white road.
- A white road in Hiroshima.
- Mother walked that scorching road
- Barefooted,
- Working clothes all torn.
- And I, who had been born
- Just 40 days before,
- Held in those arms,
- Gazed up with eyes of innocence
- To where the deep blue sky
- Stretched wide, she said.
- The white mushroom cloud
- Moved like a sea slug,
- Growing wide, and wider still.
- Mid-summer phantoms
- And those hateful things
- That happened long ago
- Are all so infinitely sad.
- The image of that single
- Long white road
- Lies in the corner of my mother's heart
- And mine
- And does not even try do die.
- The road stretches on and on;
- An endless road,
- White, dust-covered, soiled by grief.
- The road began that moment,
- The road without an end,
- The road we've walked without a pause,
- For fourteen years.
- Mother is tired.
- And I am tired.
- And when beset by waves
- Of sadness and exhaustion
- She lay a while to rest.
- Her tears fell on my face
- And left their patterns in the dust.
- A white road.
- A white road in Hiroshima
- Author not specified
From the Peace Museum,
Hiroshima, Japan
Patrick.
-- Responses Sought --
Dropped by the USAF B-29 Enola Gay, the bomb exploded
at 8:15 AM and approximately 75,000 people were killed immediately by
the blast and subsequent fires. In comparison, all bombing in WW II killed
about 30,000 people in London and about another 30,000 in the rest of
the UK. The Hiroshima death toll has probably now reached 200,000 as people
continue to die from the radiation aftereffects. Even today, certain types
of cancers still occur among Hiroshima's population in greater numbers
than in comparable cities.
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Tony Wheeler
Japan: Travel Survival Kit
Lonely Planet Publications
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