The Hiroshima poem

It's now 70 years since the first atomic bomb - Little Boy - was dropped on Hiroshima. This poem was published in Daemon 7/8 in 2005. I read it at an event in Glasgow on Hiroshima Day that year. By coincidence, that was the day my friend Robin Cook died, and it was Tommy Sheridan who told me the news, at that very reading.


Peace and quiet

In the newsreels it’s always silent;
in-sucked dust heats to incandescence,
molten beads fountain, pillar up,
a dirty eruption. Shock waves
squeeze steam out of clear air
in annular clouds. Close-ups focus
on the boiling glow, the head,
a roiling rotisserie. Roasted birds
fall from the sky. On the ground
trees, petals, pets, people, puff
to vapour in a roar, a scream
we can’t hear. On screen
Enola Gay drones home.

In a warm autumn, shinkansen zips smoothly
through the countryside. Hinoki forests yield
trunks for torii. In little fields, clipped lines
of tea bushes suggest Versailles for taste buds,
stooks of rice straw smoulder in smudge fires,
and crows foregather in persimmon trees.
Train windows, triple-glazed, cut out outside sounds.
We’re in a steel speed capsule, streamlined,
hurtling serenely to Hiroshima.


 Copyright © Colin Will 2005