On the Horizon Page 2
“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