THE DAY OF THE ATOMIC BOMB

by Kurihara Sadako

Gordon W. Prange Collection, University of Maryland Libraries

Site Ed. note: This poem was written in the tanka format sometime before July 1946. Although American censors decided to pass the poem in its entirety, Kurihara deleted the last five tanka on her own.

In the field out back,
a bluish-white flash;
thinking to myself,
"A flare,"
I look out.
 Uneasy about
the weird blue flash,
I step outside—
something
is very wrong.
 The sky is
a strange hue—
hazy;
suddenly
it's almost dusk.
 Acting on instinct—
air raid!—
I race to our trench,
and hold
my breath.
 Crawling out
of the shelter,
I find doors and shoji
blown off
and ceiling down.
 Must have been
a near miss,
and the children at school;
I become anxious,
Unbearably so.
 Go get them!
Rushing out,
I find children
on the street,
coming home crying.
 Some
are all bloody;
in my mind's eye
I keep seeing my own children
injured.
 They come home,
the older leading
the younger by hand;
they run to me,
still crying.
 Children! Children!
You're all right!
I take them firmly
by the hand
and squeeze hard.
 "I'll never let you
out of my sight!"
My love for them
swells
enormously.
 A bizarre stormcloud
rising to a peak:
the children are scared
and stay
close by me.
 Thunder rolls
like the roar
of a plane;
the children
are terrified.
(The atomic bomb exploded at 8:30 A.M.; by 10:A.M. refugees were fleeing to the suburbs in one continuous stream.)

Author's note: "The last five tanka passed prepublication censorship [1946], but I eliminated them from the first edition. On 5 August, the day before the atomic bomb fell, I had been mobilized to clear firebreaks in Tenjin-cho, ground zero. On the morning of 6 August, I saw my husband off to the Mitsubishi Precision Machine factory in Gion where we lived and the two children off to school. Then, as I was cleaning up in the kitchen, I saw the flash. I was four kilometers (two and a half miles) from ground zero."

Frightening
street of hell—
each moment
the number of refugees
grows.
 The refugees all
Have burns;
clothes
are seared
onto skin.
 Uninjured
but utterly naked,
a young girl fleeing-
I give her
my child's underpants.
 The road to the aid station
outside of town:
the line of refugees
stretches on
and on.
 On the relief trucks,
The bodies of the dead
And the injured,
blistered and
horrible.


.........................

Reference

Kurihara Sadako. Black Eggs: Poems. Trans. Richard H. Minear. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan, Center for Japanese Studies, 1994, 82-85.