How Could I Ever Forget That Flash - Mitsuyoshi Toge

[Larry Robinson]

How Could I Ever Forget That Flash

How could I ever forget that flash of light! 
In a moment, thirty thousand people ceased to be, 
The cries of fifty thousand killed 
At the bottom of crushing darkness;

Through yellow smoke whirling into light, 
Buildings split, bridges collapsed, 
Crowded trams burnt as they rolled about 
Hiroshima, all full of boundless heaps of embers. 
Soon after, skin dangling like rags; 
With hands on breasts; 
Treading upon the broken brains; 
Wearing shreds of burn cloth round their loins; 
There came numberless lines of the naked, 
                all crying. 
Bodies on the parade ground, scattered like 
                jumbled stone images of Jizo; 
Crowds in piles by the river banks, 
                loaded upon rafts fastened to the shore, 
Turned by and by into corpses 
                under the scorching sun; 
in the midst of flame 
                tossing against the evening sky, 
Round about the street where mother and 
                brother were trapped alive under the fallen house 
The fire-flood shifted on. 
On beds of filth along the Armory floor, 
Heaps, and God knew who they were? 
Heaps of schoolgirls lying in refuse 
Pot-bellied, one-eyed, with half their skin peeled 
                off bald. 
The sun shone, and nothing moved 
But the buzzing flies in the metal basins 
Reeking with stagnant ordure. 
How can I forget that stillness 
Prevailing over the city of three hundred thousands? 
Amidst that calm, 
How can I forget the entreaties 
Of departed wife and child 
Through their orbs of eyes, 
Cutting through our minds and souls?

	- Mitsuyoshi Toge



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 Hiroshima-Nagasaki: A Pictorial Record of the Atomic Destruction (1978).

 
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