Friday 5 August 2016

As if the earth


A few words to mark the memory of the 300,000 people killed by nuclear bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki 71 years ago.


as if the earth
ripped open by a cataclysm
threw up the ruins of a buried civilization
and through
grim mockery of fate
they were heaved up  into elegance
an eerie world screened by drift of smoke
where foliage sprouts from stones purged of superficial elements
and the poems run off the page . . .



5 comments:

  1. You started some of these words on a comment to me the other night didn't you? You have built on them. The words are fitting for many things

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  2. I did and they are. I was sorting through some old note books the other night and found some of the them, I mean the words, lying around doing nothing so I thought I'd do something with them. My notebooks are a bit like yours but very few pictures and lots of scribbles, jottings and crossings out. When I look at them with a fresh eye, after years it can be, the crossings out are sometimes the best bits. It's all just random thoughts, remembered phrases, and old ideas really.

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  3. I find this very interesting, Gwil, thank you - and shudder at the mental picture of that catastrophe.

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    Replies
    1. There's a man in Japan who searches for old stones from the time of the bomb 1945 in railway stations and perhaps other locations and takes rubbings of them which he displays as artworks. I wrote about it several years ago.

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    2. Brigitta, if you enter the word frottage in the blog search box you will come to my original 2008 piece.

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