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Collect
Tinian and Hiroshima are two ends
of the same ocean (steady our nerves
and make clearer our devotion);
the same waves lap them, mothers
love them, under the skin they are together
ignoring similar gods. Then cleanse
our thoughts with inspiration;
this sentiment entangles nations
in a skein of warm undoing. And here
the maps are clearer, easing our devotion.

Kyrie
Have mercy upon our microscopes we pray.
Comfort the physicist, cleanse the mathematician.
They only win who willingly obey.

Strengthen too our engines that they may,
Carrying the power of our petition,
Convert those souls who cannot yet obey.

And grant that in their suffering they may
Applaud the hands that offer their contrition
Winning where they willingly obey.

Epistle
The ants came back when the ground had cooled,
saw shadows on walls, shapes in windows
and four schoolboys cross-legged and waiting
to die. This was all that ants could understand:
the changed landscape and, along their runs,
inert obstructions that they had not known
before. Later the ants were easily forgotten,
their fame being only in the fact that they
were first. Parents followed in a similar search:
for clothing they might recognize — a shred
of kimono, clean that morning, imprinted upon
a barely moving limb. In fire all faces are
the same; only our love remains, discriminating as
before, looking for a name to hang its tragedy upon.

The four voices of charred children singing
hymns — ‘We lived together and together we
will die’ — have not yet ended. The four kindnesses
have transcended our reality. And the acts
of mercy make us burn. Now imagination
turns upon a mission we successfully
accomplished. In a new Gethsemane. Between
high hills; above the sea.

Gospel
That day we swam inside the sun
called to each other in a sea of flame
falling we rose and tried to run
and running fell and rose again

It was the sixth of August 1945
at 8.15 in a pale blue morning
‘Look’ someone cried ‘it’s a B.29’
and I looked and I wept and I died

That day we lay quietly by the roadside
piled together in a heap of burns
‘Another corpse’ the neighbours lied
but I was too tired to stay alive

It was the sixth of August 1945
at 8.15 in a pale blue morning
‘Look’ someone cried ‘it’s a B.29’
and I looked and I wept and I died

That day we swam inside the sun
the roadway melting at our feet
some were held and could not run
from the flames that flowered about them

It was the sixth of August 1945
at 8.15 in a pale blue morning
‘Look’ someone cried ‘it’s a B.29’
and I looked and I wept and I died

Four days later my family found me
and sent me away to the mountain air
not knowing I had already died
from the sun in a pale blue morning

For ‘Look’ cried my friends ‘it’s a B.29’
and I looked and I wept and I died.

Creed
I Michiko who avoided mirrors
believe in joy.
I Michiko whose face
made nightmares
believe in joy.
I Michiko transformed by fire
and remade by knives
believe in joy.

I Enemon twice fired and twice alive
believe in fear.
I Enemon twice chased
and overturned
believe in fear.
I Enemon somnambulist
and symbol of mankind
believe in fear.

I Thomas carrier of orders
believe in fire.
I Thomas doer
of deeds
believe in fire.
I Thomas dauntless
and undoubting
believe in fire.

We the authorities believe in justice.
We are surprised that deaths are not higher
and we believe in justice.
We are the wielders of power in an unjust world
and we believe in a just and righteous god.

Joy, fear, fire and justice.
O Michiko, it is a lonely world we offer
in the justification of our beliefs.

Sermon
The orders we were given never could be
traced to anyone; no fires were issued out
at any time, and no one said: We are expecting
a hundred thousand yellow bastards to be broken.
Compulsory church parades were still begun
on Sundays. Texts of Good Samaritans and
the Prodigal Son could still be heard, and
all our favourite hymns could still be sung.
Nothing was different. No one knew that
we would soon become as leprous as a bible-beggar
who will not be cured. Our miracles were all reserved
for the preservation of the free, the sanctity
of an uncultured kingdom and the hallelujah of
democracy. Many years afterwards, when travellers
with longer hair and older faces had been seen
we tried to rediscover where we’d come from —
hoping to find a castle we could carry, or an ogre
whose repugnant flesh we’d offer as a sacrifice
to our sad selves. We questioned everyone
who knew some tiny fact, tracing the tracks
through aerodromes and bright laboratories.
Always we found only a person with a passion
for obedience. Enraged, we came at last
to one who pointed at ourselves — then we
joined the church parades on Sundays,
read tracts, and roared like lions when
our favourite hymns were sung.

Confession
The headlines that morning were higher
than before. We sat a million miles away
and read them over tea. I was seventeen
and war had ceased to trouble me — there
were far more women than before, and life
was not unprofitable. I don’t remember
that the words they used were memorable;
bombs had been growing bigger since
my thirteenth birthday; atomic or H.E.,
the difference was an academic one.
Japs and Germans were not my concern —
we’d grown up with an enemy, that’s all.

That evening was our ‘Watch Ashore’. The beer
was strong and the natives there were
friendly. And when I try remembering
if on that day the sun had risen in
a brighter blaze of glory, I know
the whole attempt is futile. I have only
a picture of myself in navy blue
swaggering through bars like some hero
in a second-feature film. True, for some
the war was over, but I stewed on for two more
years in a vaguely eastern clime, equating
war-time with a long expanse of boredom.

What has happened to us all in these few years?
There the dramatic question, if it’s seen
at all, disperses like a slogan on the sky.
Or, if in a burst of honesty, we see the point
of asking, we reply ‘Nothing’. For nothing
happened to us there on that or any other day,
and everything goes on just as before.

Consecration and Communion
Ten years later Michiko came back
to her father’s house with a face
made new by a miracle of surgery

They say a smile ‘played on her lips’
that her eyes were ‘filled with sunshine’
and she communicated ‘a kind of happiness’

Now, living in the village of Saaekigun, she
writes a poetry that is full of joy, and
the village, loving her, call her ‘little sun’.

And, having a tragedy we ended in our
usual way with money and with scientists,
we cut away the cancer from our conscience.

Doing, as we have done through half our
Saturdays, we turn to go, leaving behind the
empty wrappers and the ice cream cartons.

Is this, Michiko, your will being done?
Or will you now allow a share in your great agony,
enabling us to cure ourselves a little?

As you walk over into Gethsemane an hour
before the moment comes, our shoulder eases
underneath the cross-beam that you carry.

Understand us child. We are not there at all,
but now we bare our backs and wait for blows
that history will not allow to fall.

Leave us with the hallucination that we see
the glare; grant us the sick hysteria of
burned shoulders and a quenchless thirst.

Suffer your pain again; seer us with the
misery of mirrors; but do not die, for
death is something that we cannot understand.

And so prepare us for our final degradation
that we may see you smile on us with pity
and know, at last, we never will be burned.

Gloria
Christ, Gethsemane must be
a crowded place today
with all those souls still
waiting patiently for Easter

Latterly the entrance to
Jerusalem has been
like a coastal road on
some warm Saturday

Who I wonder sang
Hosannahs to the children
when they came in hordes
that ordinary morning

Certainly there could not
have been nearly enough
asses to go round, nor
would the palms have shed

sufficient leaves. Later
we know that there were
some who walked among
the dying with a sponge

And others who gathered
like a family around
the wounds of those
that they had known

Continually it seems
we must involve ourselves
in a drama which
is similar in setting

But why must we take
flesh always by the hand and
torture it before we understand
some aspect of its love?