<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=us-ascii"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;" class="">How Could I Ever Forget That Flash</div>
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</table><p style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; line-height: normal;" class="">How could I ever forget that flash of light! <br class="">
In a moment, thirty thousand people ceased to be, <br class="">
The cries of fifty thousand killed <br class="">
At the bottom of crushing darkness;</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; line-height: normal;" class="">Through yellow smoke whirling into light, <br class="">
Buildings split, bridges collapsed, <br class="">
Crowded trams burnt as they rolled about <br class="">
Hiroshima, all full of boundless heaps of embers. <br class="">
Soon after, skin dangling like rags; <br class="">
With hands on breasts; <br class="">
Treading upon the broken brains; <br class="">
Wearing shreds of burn cloth round their loins; <br class="">
There came numberless lines of the naked, <br class="">
all crying. <br class="">
Bodies on the parade ground, scattered like <br class="">
jumbled stone images of Jizo; <br class="">
Crowds in piles by the river banks, <br class="">
loaded upon rafts fastened to the shore, <br class="">
Turned by and by into corpses <br class="">
under the scorching sun; <br class="">
in the midst of flame <br class="">
tossing against the evening sky, <br class="">
Round about the street where mother and <br class="">
brother were trapped alive under the fallen house <br class="">
The fire-flood shifted on. <br class="">
On beds of filth along the Armory floor, <br class="">
Heaps, and God knew who they were? <br class="">
Heaps of schoolgirls lying in refuse <br class="">
Pot-bellied, one-eyed, with half their skin peeled <br class="">
off bald. <br class="">
The sun shone, and nothing moved <br class="">
But the buzzing flies in the metal basins <br class="">
Reeking with stagnant ordure. <br class="">
How can I forget that stillness <br class="">
Prevailing over the city of three hundred thousands? <br class="">
Amidst that calm, <br class="">
How can I forget the entreaties <br class="">
Of departed wife and child <br class="">
Through their orbs of eyes, <br class="">
Cutting through our minds and souls?</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; line-height: normal;" class=""><span style="line-height: normal;" class=""><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></span>- Mitsuyoshi Toge</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: Times; min-height: 14px;" class=""><br class=""></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; line-height: normal; font-family: Times;" class=""><i class="">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: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: Times;" class=""> </p>
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