On the Horizon Read online

“I had bad luck with all my boys,” she said.

  Silas Wainwright

  Popular kid, Silas. Played football

  in high school. Joined everything.

  He wanted to be a doctor.

  But times were tough.

  And Silas was the oldest

  of eleven children.

  No college for him.

  He worked on the family farm.

  Then, at twenty, he enlisted.

  The navy made him a

  pharmacist’s mate.

  He learned to do minor surgery

  It was as close as he could get

  to medicine.

  Back home, in his

  small New York town,

  friends got Christmas cards

  that year from Silas.

  He’d mailed them nine days

  before he died.

  8:15, December 1941

  Frank Cabiness, PFC,

  survived. From his station

  in the mainmast high above,

  he looked down

  and saw that half of his ship

  was gone.

  His hands were burned.

  Not like his shipmates’,

  charred by flaming oil;

  his were friction burns. Grasping

  ropes and ladders, he slid down eighty feet

  to save himself that morning.

  His watch (his children have it still)

  stopped at 8:15.

  Time doesn’t matter now, to Frank.

  At eighty-six, he returned to his ship.

  Divers took his ashes down

  and placed them in the fourth gun turret,

  where he would rest with his shipmates.

  A bugler played taps

  as they took the urn and dove.

  The Fourth Turret

  One by one, the divers

  have carried their ashes below

  and placed them in the fourth turret.

  John Anderson—remember him?

  The one who lost his identical twin?

  John reached the age of ninety-eight.

  Many, many years had passed.

  Remembering his brother’s fate,

  he asked to be with Jake at last.

  Child on a Beach

  I was a child who played in the sand,

  a little shovel in my hand;

  I pranced and giggled. I was three.

  The ship sailed past. I didn’t see.

  I wonder, now that time’s gone by,

  about that day: the sea, the sky . . .

  the day I frolicked in the foam,

  when Honolulu was my home.

  I think back to that sunlit day

  when I was young, and so were they.

  If I had noticed? If I’d known?

  Would each of us be less alone?

  I’ve traveled many miles since then—

  around the world, and back again;

  I’ve learned that there will always be

  things we miss, that we don’t see

  on the horizon. Things beyond.

  And yet there is a lasting bond

  between us, linking each to each:

  Boys on a ship. Child on a beach.

  Pearl Harbor

  triolet

  Time will not age them. They are boys still:

  young in that December, and young today.

  Though others of us falter, shrink, fall ill,

  time will not age them. They are boys still.

  We’ll pause, remember, grieve for them, until

  memories fade. But though our hair turns gray,

  time will not age them. They are boys still:

  young in that December, and young today.

  PART 2.

  Another Horizon

  At 8:15 in the morning, on August 6, 1945, an American plane dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima in southern Japan. The city was destroyed. Some eighty thousand people died that day, and thousands more, afflicted with radiation sickness, died in the following weeks, months, and years.

  Ultimately, the atomic bomb brought about the end of World War II.

  Names

  Code-named “Little Boy,” the bomb

  was placed aboard. The men were calm.

  They flew six hours. The skies were clear.

  They’d arm the bomb when they drew near.

  The plane was named Enola Gay.

  It carried a whole crew that day:

  George. Tom. Wyatt. Joe.

  Dutch. Jake. Six hours to go.

  Two Roberts. Morris. Richard. Deak.

  They waited, watching; didn’t speak

  until the order came: Deploy.

  Time to release Little Boy

  At 8:15 they let it fall.

  The bomber pilot’s name was Paul.

  He’d named the airplane for his mom.

  It carried twelve men and the bomb.

  Six hours back. No talk, still. None.

  Except: My God. What have we done?

  Japanese Morning

  In a small town called Tabuse

  on August sixth, a summer day,

  a little boy, Koichi Seii,

  felt a shudder in the earth

  and saw the sky

  change.

  From Hiroshima, miles away,

  beyond the hills, beside the bay,

  on August sixth, a summer day,

  Koichi-san perceived the birth

  of something

  strange.

  Is this how it ends? The world? This way?

  On August sixth? A summer day?

  Morning light? A boy at play?

  It could. It might. It may.

  The Cloud

  They likened it, later,

  because of its shape,

  to a mushroom.

  Think of mushrooms:

  fragile,

  ascending and unfurling

  after a rain,

  rising on ragged stems

  through damp moss.

  Think of this cloud:

  savage,

  ripping sky and earth

  and future,

  spawning death

  with its spore.

  Afterward

  haiku

  White light, whirling cloud

  Next a strange ghostly silence

  Then startling black rain

  Takeo

  School was about to begin

  for Takeo and his friends.

  As they waited, they played

  hide-and-seek. Takeo was It.

  He covered his eyes and counted,

  Ichi, ni,

  Isan, shi . . .

  A blinding light came. A roar. A vibration.

  And after that, silence.

  A soldier, searching for survivors,

  heard his cries, dug through rubble,

  found him, picked him up, carried him

  through the silent, ruined city.

  He heard his name. Takeo-san! Takeo-san!

  “It’s my daddy!” he said to the soldier.

  There, on the bridge, in the silence,

  he was placed in his father’s arms.

  Later, he remembered his father’s tears,

  and how he had bowed to the soldier,

  whispering, “Thank you,” over and over.

  The Red Tricycle

  Soon four years old! A big boy!

  Shinichi Tetsutani

  played that morning,

  riding his red tricycle.

  When his parents found him,

  he was still gripping the

  handlebar. He was so proud

  of his red tricycle.

  Shin-chan, they called him.

  They buried him in the garden,

  and with him, they buried

  his red tricycle.

  He had called it his friend.

  Tomodachi.

  Tram Girls

  The country had been at war for a long time.

&nbs
p; Most of the men had gone to serve.

  Teenagers were called upon to fill their jobs.

  High school girls learned to operate

  the trams that moved through the city.

  They felt useful and proud.

  Schoolboys thought that Tram 101

  had the best-looking girls.

  They always waited for that one.

  None of that mattered

  when it happened—the bright light,

  the explosion,

  the engines fell silent.

  Akira Ishida thought it was her fault,

  that she had done something wrong,

  caused an accident.

  Then she looked to the street,

  where crowds had been walking.

  There was no one there. No one left.

  They were vaporized.

  She was a young girl with

  a singed uniform, and

  a lifetime

  of nightmares.

  Sadako Sasaki

  Legend says that if you fold one thousand

  paper cranes, a wish will be granted.

  Sadako believed that.

  She folded and folded.

  She was two

  on that August morning,

  at home when the bomb fell,

  and she seemed uninjured.

  But the black rain fell on her,

  carrying radiation.

  She folded and folded,

  there in the hospital.

  She was twelve when she died,

  surrounded by small paper birds.

  Chieko Suetomo

  Chieko survived.

  Later, she found her doll,

  the Shirley Temple doll that her father

  had brought her from a trip to the USA.

  The doll’s curls were singed,

  her pink dress charred.

  But her dimpled face

  still smiled, unscarred.

  The Tricycle

  They had buried it with him,

  the red tricycle

  that he called his friend.

  And forty years passed.

  He was three.

  Now he would be a man.

  When his parents felt ready,

  his father, old now, dug in the garden.

  Gently they took his small bones

  and moved them to a family grave.

  His friend, the tricycle?

  It rests now in a museum.

  8:15, August 1945

  Shinji Mikamo was helping his father

  that morning.

  He remembered that it was a hot day.

  He was up on the roof.

  He had raised his arm to wipe the sweat

  from his forehead, when he saw

  the blinding flash.

  His father had just called to him

  to stop daydreaming.

  Was this part of a dream?

  Then came a thundering roar,

  and he was thrown under the collapsing house.

  Two months later, at last

  able to walk again, Shinji left

  the hospital and made his way home,

  looking for his father.

  He never saw him again.

  But he found, in the ruins,

  his father’s watch. 8:15, it said.

  Hiroshima

  triolet

  The cloud appeared over the distant hill,

  blossoming like strange new flowers in spring,

  opening, growing. But the world was still.

  When the cloud appeared over the distant hill,

  silence had fallen. There were no sounds until

  rain came. Not true rain, but black drops falling

  from the cloud that appeared over a distant hill,

  blossoming like strange new flowers in spring.

  PART 3.

  Beyond the Horizons

  After we left Hawaii, I lived with my mother and my sister and brother in a small Pennsylvania town throughout World War II. My father was gone for most of the war. For many of those months, he served on the hospital ship Hope. Then he found himself on an island called Tinian. He didn’t know this—it was very secret—but on that island, they loaded the atomic bomb into the plane that would fly to Hiroshima.

  After the war ended, my dad remained in Japan, on the staff of the hospital in Tokyo. Finally, when I was eleven, we joined him there. We went by ship from New York—down through the Panama Canal, then up the coast of California, stopping for other passengers in San Francisco, and finally across the Pacific Ocean.

  It was a very long trip. When we arrived, my father met us and drove us to our new home in Tokyo. On the way, he whispered to me that he had a surprise waiting for me there.

  It was a green bicycle.

  Meiji

  So much had been destroyed.

  Some places were rubble.

  But near my home, in Shibuya,

  I would ride my bicycle to the

  Great Torii of Meiji Shrine.

  Inside the temple grounds,

  ancient trees still stood.

  People walked slowly

  and were quiet.

  Beyond the walls,

  the sounds of the city continued.

  The rubble remained.

  But within that gate,

  everything was hushed

  and unbroken.

  After That Morning

  After the August morning

  when the bright light

  seared Hiroshima

  into nothingness,

  Koichi Seii, now eight,

  had left his home

  where the sky and air