<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 16px/normal Helvetica; "><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3">How Could I Ever Forget That Flash</font></div>
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</table><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 18.0px 0.0px; font: 18.0px Times"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica">How could I ever forget that flash of light! <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span>In a moment, thirty thousand people ceased to be, <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span>The cries of fifty thousand killed <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span>At the bottom of crushing darkness;</font></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 18.0px 0.0px; font: 18.0px Times"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica">Through yellow smoke whirling into light, <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span>Buildings split, bridges collapsed, <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span>Crowded trams burnt as they rolled about <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span>Hiroshima, all full of boundless heaps of embers. <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span>Soon after, skin dangling like rags; <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span>With hands on breasts; <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span>Treading upon the broken brains; <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span>Wearing shreds of burn cloth round their loins; <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span>There came numberless lines of the naked, <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span> all crying. <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span>Bodies on the parade ground, scattered like <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span> jumbled stone images of Jizo; <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span>Crowds in piles by the river banks, <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span> loaded upon rafts fastened to the shore, <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span>Turned by and by into corpses <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span> under the scorching sun; <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span>in the midst of flame <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span> tossing against the evening sky, <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span>Round about the street where mother and <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span> brother were trapped alive under the fallen house <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span>The fire-flood shifted on. <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span>On beds of filth along the Armory floor, <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span>Heaps, and God knew who they were? <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span>Heaps of schoolgirls lying in refuse <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span>Pot-bellied, one-eyed, with half their skin peeled <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span> off bald. <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span>The sun shone, and nothing moved <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span>But the buzzing flies in the metal basins <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span>Reeking with stagnant ordure. <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span>How can I forget that stillness <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span>Prevailing over the city of three hundred thousands? <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span>Amidst that calm, <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span>How can I forget the entreaties <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span>Of departed wife and child <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span>Through their orbs of eyes, <span style="font: 18.0px 'Lucida Grande'"><br>
</span>Cutting through our minds and souls?</font></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 18.0px 0.0px; font: 18.0px Times"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica" size="3"><span style="font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></span>- Mitsuyoshi Toge</font></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 18.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><br></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 18.0px 0.0px; font: 18.0px Times"><i>Mitsuyoshi Toge, born in Hiroshima in 1917, was a Catholic and a poet. He was in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped on the city on August 6, 1945, when he was 24 years old. Toge died at age 36. His firsthand experience of the bomb, his passion for peace, and his realistic insight into the event made him a leading poet in Hiroshima. This poem is from </i>Hiroshima-Nagasaki: A Pictorial Record of the Atomic Destruction (1978).</p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"> </p><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; min-height: 14px; "><br></div></body></html>