{"id":63,"date":"2005-08-06T09:29:00","date_gmt":"2005-08-06T17:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=63"},"modified":"2005-08-06T09:29:00","modified_gmt":"2005-08-06T17:29:00","slug":"dying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/dying\/","title":{"rendered":"Dying"},"content":{"rendered":"

For today, a poem by T\u00f6ge Sankichi (1912-1953) from the book Poems of the Atomic Bomb<\/span>, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima, reprinted here from Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris’ anthology Poems for the Millennium, vol. 2<\/span>:<\/p>\n

\n
On the morning of August 6, 1945, at home in a part of town more than three kilometers from Ground Zero, I was just about to set out for downtown Hiroshima when the bomb fell, and I escaped merely with cuts from splinters of glass and with atomic bomb sickness… Today everyone knows that at Hiroshima about 300,000 people were killed in the blast of a single atomic bomb. And at Nagasaki, 100,000 or so.<\/span><\/div>\n

Dying<\/span><\/p>\n

!
Loud in my ear: screams.
Soundlessly welling up,
pouncing on me:
space, all upside-down.
Hanging, fluttering clouds of dust
smelling of smoke,
and, running madly about, figures.
“Ah,
get out
of here!”
Scattering fragments of brick,
I spring to my feet;
my body’s
on fire.
The hot blast
that blew me down from behind
set sleeves, shoulders
on fire.
Amid the smoke I grab
a corner of the cement water tank;
my head \u2014
already in.
The clothes I splash water on
burn, drop off:
gone.
Wires, boards, nails, glass,
a rippling wall of tiles.
Fingerrnails burn:
heels\u2014gone;
plastered to my back: a sheet of molten lead.
“Owww!”
Flames already
blacken;
telephone poles, walls, too.
Eddies
of flame and smoke
blow down on my broken head.
“Hiro-chan! Hiro-chan!”
Press hand to breast:
ah\u2014a bloody cotton hole.
Fallen, I cry\u2014
Child! Child! Child! Where are you?
Amid the smoke that crawls along the ground\u2014
where could they have come from?\u2014
hand in hand
round and round as in a bon<\/span> dance,
naked girls:
one falls, all fall.
From under tiles,
someone else’s shoulder:
a hairless old woman,
driven up by the heat,
writhing, crying shrilly.
Besides the road where flames already flicker,
stomachs distended like great drums,
even their lips torn off:
lumps of red flesh.
A hand that grabs my ankle
splips off, peels off.
Am eyeball that pleads at my feet.
A head boiled white.
Hair, brain matter my hand presses down on.
Steamy smoke; fiery air that rushes at me.
Amid the darkness of flying sparks:
children’s eyes, the color of gold.
Burning body,
scalding throat;
arm
that suddenly collapses:
shoulder
that sinks into the ground.
Oh, I can go
no farther.
In the lonely dark,
the thunder in my ears suddenly fades.
Ah!
Why?
Why here
by the side of the road
cut off, dear, from you;
why
must
I
die
?<\/p>\n

[translation from the Japanese by Richard Minear]<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For today, a poem by T\u00f6ge Sankichi (1912-1953) from the book Poems of the Atomic Bomb, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima, reprinted here from Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}