Stop Divine Strake

Give back my father, give back my mother;
Give grandpa back, grandma back;
Give me my sons and daughters back.
Give me back myself.
Give back the human race.
As long as this life lasts, this life,
Give back peace
That will never end.

Sankichi Toge was born in Japan in 1921 and started writing poems at the age of eighteen. At 24, he was in Hiroshima - only 3 km from the hypocenter - when the atomic bomb was dropped on that city. Having experienced the tragedy of the bombing, he started peace movements with young people. In 1950, the Korean war broke out and on that occasion U.S. President Truman hinted that his country might again use nuclear weapons.

Hearing the statement by the President, Sankichi Toge decided to publish an atomic bombing anthology to call for peace in the world despite severe control of the press by the GHQ (General Headquarters) of the Allied. In 1951, his poem was publicly introduced in the Berlin Peace Conference and attracted a great response around the world.

His first hand experience of the bomb, his passion for peace and his realistic insight into the event made him the leading Hiroshima poet in Japan. Even today, we can come in touch with his desire "No More Hiroshima" through reading his poem inscribed on the monument.

I once wanted to build my world on your shoulders where I felt I escaped all the spiders of the world.

at speeds that make my empty stomach scream, my head spin, my eyes wanting to retreat back into the dark sockets of my skull

wanting to crash silently, loudly, angrily, passionately, deliberately against the embrace of the only thing I now know I have to trust: the hard earth and rock.

No More Hiroshimas

At the station exit, my bundle in hand,

Early the winter afternoon’s wet snow

Falls thinly round me, out of a crudded sun.

I had forgotten to remember where I was.

Looking about, I see it might be anywhere –

A station, a town like any other in Japan,

Ramshackle, muddy, noisy, drab; a cheerfully

Shallow impermanence: peeling concrete, litter, ‘Atomic

Lotion, for hair fall-out,’ a flimsy department store;

Racks and towers of neon, flashy over tiled and tilted waves

Of little roofs, shacks cascading lemons and persimmons,

Oranges and dark-red apples, shanties awash with rainbows

Of squid and octopus, shellfish, slabs of tuna, oysters, ice,

Ablaze with fans of soiled nude-picture books

Thumbed abstractedly by schoolboys, with second-hand looks.

The river remains unchanged, sad, refusing rehabilitation.

In this long, wide, empty official boulevard

The new trees are still small, the office blocks

Basely functional. The bridge a slick abstraction.

But the river remains unchanged, sad, refusing rehabilitation.

In the city centre, far from the station’s lively squalor,

A kind of life goes on, in cinemas and hi-fi coffee bars,

In the shuffling racket of pin-table palaces and parlours,

The souvenir shops piled high with junk, kimonoed kewpie dolls,

Models of the bombed Industry Promotion Hall, memorial ruin

Tricked out with glitter-frost and artificial pearls.

Set in an awful emptiness, the modern tourist hotel is trimmed

With jaded Christmas frippery, flatulent balloons; in the hall,

A giant dingy iced cake in the shape of a Cinderella coach.

The contemporary stairs are treacherous, the corridors

Deserted, my room an overheated morgue, the bar in darkness.

Punctually, the electric chimes ring out across the tidy waste

Their doleful public hymn – the tune unrecognizable, evangelist.

Here atomic peace is geared to meet the tourist trade.

Let it remain like this, for all the world to see,

Without nobility or loveliness, and dogged with shame

That is beyond all hope of indignation. Anger, too, is dead.

And why should memorials of what was far

From pleasant have the grace that helps us to forget?

In the dying afternoon, I wander dying round the Park of Peace.

It is right, this squat, dead place, with its left-over air

Of an abandoned International Trade and Tourist Fair.

The stunted trees are wrapped in straw against the cold.

The gardeners are old, old women in blue bloomers, white aprons,

Survivors weeding the dead brown lawns around the Children’s Monument.

A hideous pile, the Atomic Bomb Explosion Centre, freezing cold,

‘Includes the Peace Tower, a museum containing

Atomic-melted slates and bricks, photos showing

What the Atomic Desert looked like, and other

Relics of the catastrophe.’

The other relics:

The ones that made me weep;

The bits of burnt clothing,

The stopped watches, the torn shirts,

The twisted buttons,

The stained and tattered vests and drawers,

The ripped kimonos and charred boots,

The white blouse polka-dotted with atomic rain, indelible,

The cotton summer pants the blasted boys crawled home in, to bleed

And slowly die.

Remember only these.

They are the memorials we need.

Hiroshima, New Year, 1960

Poem from No More Hiroshimas, By James Kirkup

ISBN 0 85124 689 3

Poets have addressed the subject. But poetry in America has had dwindling cultural impact since 1945. Besides the massive shadow cast on most other arts by movies, television and rock music (the electronic triangle which defines American culture in the nuclear age), another possible factor in the loss of cultural impact for modern poetry has been national attitudes toward nuclear war—that the "unthinkable" is a topic in which speculation is best left to experts or Hollywood's cinema chamber of horrors, that the underlying temper of the times is too terror-filled to be "poetic," that the end of our era could well be disaster beyond words.

What could poets, whose baliwick in the popular perception has been to compose light verse or sentimental ballads, what could these moody dreamers add to the heart-churning reality of space age inventions spinning out of the trillion-dollar technology of the nuclear arms race, technology with the power of God to create a world-destroying Doomsday of nuclear holocaust? This is visual, eye-popping stuff-flame-spewing missiles, cities turned into hell in an instant—made for the giant silver screen and eagle's eye-view of television.'

From The Nightmare Considered: Critical Essays on Nuclear War Literature, 1991. p. 85

Shadow on a Wall