“I am become Death”*

( Hiroshima 08h15
August 6, 1945 )

early morning

cats scrounged for food
dogs roamed
birds chirped

people stirred
children laughed
lovers quarrelled

while the beast approached

carrying its lethal payload

and then …

43 seconds after the US B-29 Bomber ‘Enola Gay’ dropped its payload –

codenamed ‘Little Boy’

the blast occurred

temperatures reached 1 million degrees celcius

while
below

the city of Hiroshima was cloaked under a mushroom cloud

16 kilometres into the radioactive sky

140,000 people died on that August day in Hiroshima

the survivors known as the Hibakusha spoke of horrors beyond words:

a teenage girl with her right eyeball hanging from her face

a woman grasping at her torso to stop her intestines falling through

bodies littered the ground

limbless charred flesh burnt off

shadows of human beings imprinted by the blast onto stone

chunks of hair
falling off
skin peeling

flesh falling to the roasting crematorium that was Hiroshima

we remember Hiroshima
we remember Nagasaki

we say never again

never ever again.

______________________

Eyewitness account by Sunao Tsuboi 20 years at the time and 90 years old now.

Thanks to the article from AFP wires “Cloud of Hell and Death”

* – Robert Oppenheimer’s quote from the Bhagavad Gita “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”