“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”
