Blood
While taking down lecture notes,
My head bent intently,
All of a sudden
A drop of blood fell on my pencil,
My nose was bleeding.
Without ceasing,
The flow continued
Coloring the words, turning them red.
Death,
That word that raises its head
From some corner of my heart, awaiting its chance.
Death!
But I do not want to die,
Because of the Atomic-bomb,
I do not want to die without speaking a word.
Is it right that the Bomb, all over the globe,
May drop and take away people’s lives;
May force other wretches such as I
To bear a fate like mine forever
All over the globe?
I do not want to die!
I steal a glance at my arm, under my sleeve…
Death’s spot is not there yet.
Morning
They dream:
A workman dreams, lowering his pickaxe, with sweat in scars from the flash;
A wife dreams, bending over the sewing-machine, in the odor of sedorrhoea reeking from her slipped skin;
A box office girl dreams, her feet curved like a crab’s, hidden in both hands;
A match-seller also dreams, with shattered glass still fast in her neck.
Thus they dream:
Through an element out of pitchblende and carnotite
By means of an everlasting division of energy,
Famished deserts shall be changed into fertile fields;
Bright canals run round the feet of crumbling mountains;
Under the artificial suns, in the waste lands of the Arctic,
Cities and towns shall be built of pure gold.
Thus they dream:
In the shade of trees where working-people take their rest,
That festival flags are waving, and the legends of Hiroshima are told by their tender lips.
Thus they dream:
That those swine in men’s shape
Who know not how to use the power from earth’s center except for slaughter
Survive only in picture books for the little ones;
That the energy of ten million horse power per gram, one thousand times as strong as high-explosive,
Is delivered, out of the Atom, into the hands of the people;
That the rich crop of science
May be conveyed, in peace, among people,
And like bunches of abundant grapes,
Wet with drew,
Be gathered in
At dawn.
