Hiroshima

One of the greatest and most terrible events in history. Let us be humbled.

They saw not my blind eyes, one melted closed

Or that my lips curled upwards from my teeth,

That draped across me were a lizard’s clothes

Supported by my skeleton beneath.

 

The atom broke apart upon Japan

And broke apart all witness to this feat,

The ingenuity a master’s plan

Importing only chaos in the street.

 

An alien, mercurial I fled

From out the fire and saw one final tree

Turned sick and sour, black and dead,

As ruptured too the final eye in me.

 

That tyrants tear the universe apart

Is truer than the maths they used to win,

The evidence for each is in my heart,

Exploding underneath my searing skin.

 

The universe has taught mankind its soul

And we should tremble as we heedless learn

The secrets nature hid and that we stole

For fierce are the higher power’s burns.

 

She spared the men whose pride had overgrown

And callous, so she is, she tortured me.

She vapourised all that I’d ever known

Disinterested in remorse or glee.

 

Indifference is the opposite of love

And this we find when venturing too far

Below our scale, in turn too far above,

For man is not an atom or a star.

 

Her Eden’s cradle long have we outgrown,

So think ambitious men who seek to tame

Her limits and who felt their power shown

In man’s crescendo at war’s deadly game.

 

I was not then in awe of humankind,

I feared more that hell had overspilled;

Apocalyptic power's her design,

Disdaining domination by the skilled.