HUMAN EMPEROR, MEEK AND MILD
by Kurihara Sadako
Site Ed. note: The following poem was written in free verse form in December 1952, less than a year before the end of the Allied Occupation of Japan. Date and place of publication is unknown.
He beams at puppies
and smiles sweetly-"Take care!"-
at old folks in rest homes
and war orphans,
he of the round shoulders, he whom the retarded children
at Roppo School
call Grandpa:
human emperor, meek and mild.
But the Court sent maroon limousines especially
From Tokyo to Hiroshima,
day laborers and volunteers cleaned up
all the city streets,
and the prefecture appropriated millions of yen
for police with pistols and nightsticks,
killed four cows for his three-day stay-
gift-wrapping and refrigerating only what he himself
would eat,
and awaited his arrival.
Disabled vets in dirty white,
arms and legs missing, call out in the streets,
and daughters of defeat
walk arm in arm with American soldiers.
Shacks of scorched sheet metal
and the dark swarm who live hand to mouth
have been cleared out by force,
and Hiroshima is a city
of high-rise buildings.
The emperor praises the city for having come back
beyond recognition,
but the only ones who've come back are
the bloodsucking merchants of death.
Blown like leaves into piles,
living in shacks
huddled on riverbanks,
cupboards bare,
subsisting from day to day:
the clan of thin-blooded Hiroshimans.
Rumors are rampant of khaki-clad armies
crossing the straits to Korea,
and soon they'll try to turn our husbands and sons
into human bullets once more—
does he know?
Does he not know?
Round-shouldered,
he beams at puppies:
human emperor, meek and mild.
.........................
Reference
Kurihara Sadako. Black Eggs: Poems. Trans. Richard H. Minear. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan, Center for Japanese Studies, 1994, 246-247.
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