Red pencil

A bowl of rice steams beneath the window,

a mother ties back her hair,

a child counts sparrows on a telephone wire.

Nothing remarkable about the sky.

Blue is blue.

August is August.

The river carries small boats

past bridges, past houses,

past people who have somewhere to go.

The child is told to stay close to home.

He carries a red pencil, draws a mountain

on the back of yesterday’s newspaper.

His mountain has no soldiers.

No airplanes. No borders.

Only a bright summer sun.

8:15 am

The world becomes white.

Not morning light. Not lightning bright .

Something without a name that burns names from things.

A house lifts as if the earth has forgotten how to hold it.

The bowl becomes fragments.

The window becomes knives.

The mother reaches

but her hand is no longer

where she left it.

And the child – her child,

who was drawing a mountain without soldiers

is suddenly smaller than a memory.

For one impossible instant

he sees the river glowing.

He sees the bridge.

He sees his red pencil

rolling through the air.

Then he disappears.

Not running.

Not falling.

Not screaming.

He disappears

the way breath disappears

from a mirror.

Explanations for the bombing come later.

Men gather around maps.

They point to coordinates.

They name the aircraft, the pilot,

the bomb, the mission, the target.

They speak of necessity and victory.

They list numbers large enough

to make individual lives

seem like grains of rice.

They say Hiroshima.

They say August 6.

They say 8:15 in the morning.

They say seventy thousand immediately perished.

When the first year ends, it doubles.

Add generations never born and it becomes infinity.

Numbers don’t remember the red pencil.

Military reports don’t record

a mountain drawn on yesterday’s newspaper.

No map marks the place

where a child stood

beneath an ordinary sky.

Someone finds a shoe.

Someone finds pieces of a shattered bowl.

Someone finds a photograph burned almost white.

The river keeps moving. Ash settles on rooftops.

A mother walks through dust calling a name

that sounds like a question.

Historians write the story.

They turn pages.

They argue over verbs.

Dropped. Destroyed. Killed.

I want it to stop

before the sentence ends.

I want to stand where the child stood,

hold his red pencil,

finish the picture of a mountain with no soldiers.

I want to give him one more morning.

One more bowl of rice.

One more sparrow on a telephone wire to count.

One more chance to draw the sun.

When we say a bomb exploded over Hiroshima,

we must also say a child was a witness.

He had a name.

He had a mother.

He was making something.

And after the flash,

in the terrible arithmetic of history,

he became dust.

And the dust blew into the river,

and the river carried him past the broken bridge,

past the ruined houses…out into the sea.

8-12-26