RECONSTRUCTION

by Kurihara Sadako

Gordon W. Prange Collection, University of Maryland Libraries

Site Ed. note: This poem was written in January 1946 and appeared three months later in the inaugural issue of Chūgoku bunka (a special issue on the atomic bomb), March 1946. In August, American censors passed it for publication in the anthology, Kuroi tamago (Black Eggs).

Insides hollow, windows blown out in the blast,
Mouths gaping idiotically.
the great buildings are like people done in
by the tragedy of the century.
Their trunks a forlorn row, the black trees
that survived the flames
sing a weird song of death,
and the rubble still holds horror and the stench of death.
 To this city—
has time passed so quickly?—
those who fled that day’s horrible hell
to villages in the hills return,
recovered in body if not in soul,
and build small huts.
 With child, spouse mother dead
who needs a large house?
In the small shacks
the survivors call constantly, “come closer,”
keep each other warm, and carry on.
 Day by day, the shacks grow in number, and land
thought barren—
it too is leveled nicely and soon green with vegetables.
Here and there even now people raise small ridgepoles
and build houses.
The houses are crude, like those the first humans built
in the virgin forest,
but these people show even more resolute strength
than the first humans.

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

Reference

Kurihara Sadako. Black Eggs: Poems. Trans. Richard H. Minear. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan, Center for Japanese Studies, 1994, 71-72.