A White Rose in Nagasaki.

It's that time of the week again, true believers. It's going to be a tough week, but not impossible ("aim for its head!" A nice shiny quarter for the guy who can tell me what that's from.). Anyway, I decided to post one of my own today and see how you like it. If you like it, show some love. If you don't show some hate. If you're in between, show some in between-ness. And if you just don't care, then I hope you feel like it was 2 minutes of your time well spent. Stay up. Safety and peace, as always.


A White Rose in Nagasaki

He speaks his troubles before an altar.
Men twice his size surround him on either side
heads bowed without a second thought.
This is what it means to be respected.
He lets prayers in a language I don’t quite understand
fall from his lips and his fingers
into the walls of sumo halls where the cherry blossom smell still lingers
like tradition lost in time. He leads the prayer like every morning, but it’s hotter than usual.
And sensei, was it you
who told me the heat drives people crazy
and was it you who told me
death is but life’s next great adventure?
I wonder sensei, what it’s was like to be that man.
in a place I’ve never been
with people I’ve never seen
was it like a dream
when waves washed over practiced praying hands
that were not made of water.
And I wonder if they still smelled cherry blossoms
as the moments counted down to flames
or if there was a single white rose in Nagasaki.
A white rose, from Nagasaki. A white, ROSE from Nagasaki
and there was nothing left.
He sits, still as plutonium a second before the atom splits,
in a place I’ve never been
with people I’ve never seen
was it like a dream
and is it a dream he remembered?
Two bombs fell that August.
Hiroshima hit Monday
but the little boy played so violently
that no one remembers a Fat Man laughing from Thursday
I thumb through my history books
and see a tragic footnote.
War is tragic and I wonder
if we remember it? If we remember him,
if we remember the flower growing from the blank cenotaph
that stands on the land where a hero once lived
the old man leading a stable was respected
and now his name means nothing
and neither does the smell.
when the Fat Man’s last belly laugh
comes from the epicenter of the sweetest fallout I have ever smelled.
I feel lost in time.
He sits, waiting to be remembered with flowers placed on his grave
but does not expect any. He just chants
for the mistakes a world has made when we let little boys out to play
and left Fat Men out there to molest them
this city is dead and yet we still
can’t hear his guidance, too busy trying to drive one another out of a sumo ring
and I know war is not the fairest of things
and the world is in my hands and I don’t care
I’m just waiting on the roses to grow. To replace cherry blossoms
that this city’s touch cannot even remember
when foreign hands have tried to mend it
with shears too big and aspirations too small I wonder
if flowers can sprout from concrete why can’t fallout smell as sweet
as roses of a different name, marking the grave of our mistake.