LUMBERJACKED CITIES - poem about Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden and the Firebombing of Tokyo

LUMBERJACKED CITIES

Dresden

Dresden is the good German,
Taxpayer and scout master,
Keeping a low profile for the duration,
Safe in a civilian city made of wooden houses
Possessed of absolutely no strategic value.
Dresden (his personal name is Fritz)
Is a productive member of the German middle class,
Fond of beer but always home for tea.
Blood pressure a little high, to tell the truth,
But otherwise unremarkable.
He and his wife are together at the end,
Being boiled alive in the water tank
They thought would offer refuge from the flames.
Of the many ways there are to die,
This one
Cannot be said to be user-friendly.

Tokyo

Tokyo is an old man now,
Who has stumbled beyond possession of a name.
His personal patch of riverside,
His burns unit for the moment,
Is lit by clouds reflecting lurid red.
Old, he finds his recollections failing.
He cannot remember how it is
That his skin became pork crackling.
He has no understanding of why it is
That when he calls
Not one member of his many-peopled family
Comes to his aid.
The consuming flames are reflected from the river waters
For many hours.
A city is not the easiest thing to burn.
His life, deceasing,
Earns him no paragraph.
His death
Never gets its movie.

Hiroshima

Hiroshima is a woman, her expectation
The daily ration,
Survival on short commons
In the safety of an obscure and unimportant city
Nowhere near a battlefield.
Then the universe
Gives her a nudge.
The fireball
Is a red-hot furnace
Slammed directly into her eyes.

The blast
Is a utility pole
Rammed up her privacy.
She has nothing sacred.
She is one big meathook rape,
Helpless to defend herself.
Her back is broken,
Her hair on fire,
Her teeth displaced.
Her nose is a red truncation.
The caprice of demons chortles in her flesh.
She dies in slow eternities,
Forgetting,
As she dies,
The colors black and white,
Her father's name,
And what exactly that it was
Her mother's milk once tasted of.
The cherry blossom will no longer bloom for her.
Dying,
She forgets her very name,
So you, if you so choose,
May give her one of yours.

Nagasaki

Nagasaki is a child
Still young enough to believe in rainbows.
Her household has been deleted.
Now she survives alone
If living beyond the black rain
Can be said to be survival.
Her teeth are loose,
Her gums are raw and bleeding
And her hair
Is already starting to fall out.
Her story
Is too sad to continue.

Kaddish

In the cool retrospectives of our museums
We recapitulate,
Tabulating statistics.
Compared to the Black Death,
Dresden, all said and done,
Was an ocean's raindrop.
Hiroshima has no holocaust to outcompete
With Genghis Khan.
Even so,
In the inventories of our statistics,
The souls are too numerous to be lamented
One by one.
We cannot say kaddish
For each and every.
In the streets of Dresden, the German survivors
Collected wedding rings in buckets.
The wedding bands,
Engraved with the identities of the married,
Would help identify those many of the dead
Who no longer had faces.
I have a pocket calculator and can, at need,
Compute and recompute the actual numbers.
But what they really mean I cannot say.
Beyond my child's misfortune,
My mother's death,
I have no gauge at all
For human suffering.
The sundry catastrophes
Are as mute to me as the dictionary,
Saying no more to me of human tears
Than words at random chosen from the page:
Pinecone, wombat, blancmange.
This is the limit of my eloquence on death,
The death of millions.
This limitation
Is not cultural.
I share it with my entire species.
In the haystacks of our holocausts
The individual needle goes unsung.