How could I ever forget that flash of light!
In a moment thirty thousand people ceased to be
The cries of fifty thousand killed
Through yellow smoke whirling into light
Buildings split, bridges collapsed
Crowded trams burnt as they rolled about
Hiroshima, all full of boundless heaps of embers
Soon after, skin dangling like rags
With hands on breasts
Treading upon the spilt brains
Wearing shreds of burnt cloth round their loins
There came numberless lines of the naked
all crying
Bodies on the parade ground, scattered like
jumbled stone images
Crowds in piles by the river banks
loaded upon rafts fastened to shore
Turned by and by into corpses
under the scorching sun
In the midst of flame
tossing against the evening sky
Round about the street where mother and
brother were trapped alive under the fallen house
The fire-flood shifted on
On beds of filth along the Armory floor
Heaps, God knew who they were....
Heaps of schoolgirls lying in refuse
Pot-bellied, one-eyed
with half their skin peeled off, bald
The sun shone, and nothing moved
but the buzzing flies in the metal basins
Reeking with stagnant odor
How can I forget that stillness
Prevailing over the city of three hundred thousand?
Amidst that calm
How can I forget the entreaties
Of the departed wife and child
Through their orbs of eyes
Cutting through our minds and souls?
"Sankichi Toge was born in Japan in 1921 and started writing poems at the age of eighteen. At 24, he was in Hiroshima - only 3 km from the hypocenter - when the atomic bomb was dropped on that city. Having experienced the tragedy of the bombing, he started peace movements with young people. In 1950, the Korean war broke out and on that occasion the US President Truman hinted that his country might again use nuclear weapons.
Hearing the statement by the President, Sankichi Toge decided to publish an atomic bombing anthology to call for peace in the world despite severe control of the press by the GHQ (General Headquarters) of the Allied. In 1951, his poem was publicly introduced in the Berlin Peace Conference and attracted a great response around the world.
He died at age thirty-six, a victim of leukemia resulting from the A-bomb.
His first hand experience of the bomb, his passion for peace and his realistic insight into the event made him the leading Hiroshima poet in Japan. Even today, we can come in touch with his desire of "No More Hiroshima"."-AfterDowningStreet.org.
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