War, Literature & the Arts publication of War’s End (3 Days After Hiroshima)

At last, my Nagasaki poem appeared in the War, Literature & the Arts, an international journal of the humanities / Volume 34 / 2022, from the US Air Force. It was a long birthing process: two and a half years to be exact. And somehow strangely fitting that the Fall issue was published on the winter solstice, the coming of light. 

I don’t publish very often. But this was a wait of epic proportions. First there was Covid, then the editor retired, then the website died, and the web hosting site died as well, so the entire WLA magazine had to be reconstructed from scratch—so this is a brand new website. Thank you, editor Thomas Maguire. Perseverance furthers.

“In 1989 WLA was launched as a simple collection of six essays examining the nexus of culture, conflict, and war. More than three decades later, WLA continues its exploration through a growing range of creative genres. Artists of all types share wars' jagged and fragmented horrors alongside its provocative and captivating narratives.” 

When colleague Jane Hirshfield began to teach poetry workshops on the East Coast, I asked her why she was teaching poetry to West Point cadets, and she said they need poetry more than ever. So I took a page out of her book and submitted this poem to the US Air Force Academy, never dreaming they would take my poem. what a great solstice gift, considering the source of the light. I am Shiva.

Featured poet, John Balaban, with whom I shared a publication credit in the 1995 anthology, Atomic Ghost: Poets respond to the nuclear age, (his title poem, BTW), quoted WH Auden in his preface in WLA.

“The problem for a poet in writing about modern war is that, while he can only deal with events of which he has firsthand knowledge—invention, however imaginative, is bound to be fake—his poems must somehow transcend mere journalistic reportage.” 

Hopefully my poem transcends mere journalistic reportage.

Table of Contents and intro.

Maureen Hurley / War’s End (3 Days After Hiroshima) 

Here is my blog link with photo which they didn’t use.

At the last minute, I was asked to create an author’s note:

Author’s Note

Hurley’s uncles served in the army and navy; one built Liberty Ships at Marinship in Sausalito. Her father served in the Coast Guard, and a cousin, a mathematician, worked on the Manhattan Project. Her neighbor, a ship’s captain, was torpedoed in the Mekong Delta incident. She remembers ducking under her desk as atomic bombs were being detonated in Jackass Flats, NV. Her algebra teacher was Olympic runner and gold medalist Archie Williams, famed Tuskegee airman who trained fighter pilots.

These fragments of personal history inform her writing. Her poems have appeared in Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age (Coffee House Press, 1995), and myriad periodicals. Hurley was co-editor of Tracks in the Widest Orbit: Collected Poems of J. H. Montrose (Russian River Writers’ Guild, 1985). Montrose, a WWII pilot, shared his observations of the Bikini Island nuclear tests with Hurley, and he told her how he flew over Japan dropping leaflets warning them of the Hiroshima bombing. Maureen grew up piecing together fragments of war stories. Poet Jane Hirshfield, who taught poetry to cadets at West Point Military Academy, suggested she submit her poems to journals that address war and its consequences

WAR'S END (3 days after Hiroshima)

What happened to pilot Major Charles Sweeney
after he dropped Fat Man on Nagasaki?
Did he think he could turn the B-29 Silverplate bomber,

Bockscar, around in the wild blue yonder, then fly back
on empty to Tinian, largest airbase in the world,

as if nothing had happened? After all, he'd practiced
13 trial runs, and 3 dress rehearsals. Shame to waste all that....

The Great Artiste wasn't ready, so he swapped planes.

Ground crew warned him the reserve fuel pump was bad.

The mission was moved up two days because of a typhoon.

Nearing the 11th hour, mad Sweeney circled three times

looking for a gap in the clouds, but he was low on fuel,

so his original target, Kokura, with its venerable castles
obscured by clouds, was spared to live another day.
A fuel pump sealed the fate of Japan's window to the world.
Nagasaki, home of M. Butterfly, became the hired wife, Plan B.

Tapping the fuel gauge, Sweeney ignored orders. Flying blind,
he could've aborted, but he bombed Nagasaki anyway,
when it appeared through a curtain of clouds like a mirage.

Looking over his shoulder, the pilot who leveled Nagasaki,

saw an iridescent lightning-infused cloud rising 
faster than Hiroshima, more intense, more angry, 
at once breathtaking and ominous.

Unable to reach Iwo Jima, he crash-landed

on Yontan Field, in Okinawa, both engines, dead. 

The plane hovered on the edge of the cliff like a tired gull.

An officer shouted, You fucked up, didn't you, Chuck?

Another said We had the wrong guy flying the plane.
Even Enola Gay's pilot Paul Tibbets went a little mad.

But Sweeney, who commanded the last atomic mission, 

maintained to his dying day that he'd made the right decision.
I took no pride or pleasure in the brutality of war, 

whether suffered by my people or those of another nation. 

Every life is precious. But I felt no remorse or guilt 

that I had bombed the city where I stood.

Did we also drop evacuation leaflets, like paper doves,

or was that another story of a story told after the fact?
After Tokyo, Hiroshima, then Nagasaki. Emperor Hirohito said:
We must now bear the unbearable and endure the unendurable.
A hundred thousand gone. According to the Manhattan Project,
it was a smashing success. But Shiva was unleashed,
and a hundred thousand more burned from within.
The voices of the hibakusha sang a silent aria of grief.
Oppenheimer invoked Vishnu:
I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

No matter that the Japanese, already defeated, 

had surrendered, de facto. But we taught them

a lesson, not once, not twice, but three times

for Pearl Harbor. And we taught them again.

Again and again.

7/23/19

Published in the 2022 fall issue of 

War, Literature, & the Arts anthology (online)

Dept. of English & Fine Arts, 

United States Air Force Academy, Colorado

War, Literature & the Arts publication of War’s End

Today, on this 73rd anniversary of Hiroshima

Today, on this 73rd anniversary of Hiroshima, I can't stop weeping. It's as if all the atrocities of the world have come home to roost. Fat Man, and Little Boy. I touched the cold green casings of their brethren at Los Alamos and wept. Green, the color of life, and, hell on earth. People's shadows etched into concrete for eternity. It makes me weep now, just thinking of it. My mother's cousin was a mathematician for the Manhattan Project, so Los Alamos was one of her addresses, only the government denied its existence, so postcards to her aunt, my grandmother, were delivered from New Mexico, no address. We found this out after she had died of cancer. It was a well-kept secret. Say the names. Stallion Gate. Alamagordo. Los Alamos. Say Trinitite. Come to an understanding of that unholy fused green glass blooming in the white sands. The illusion of thousands of paper cranes floating on the breeze, like at Manzanar. I keep one by my bed to ward off dreams. A memento mori for the past that we cannot change. Nor recover from. Nor should we. It's as if the grief has settled in my breast. Today I have taken baby steps, and have begun what is called in Sweden, dostadning, or death cleaning, to decrease the burden of footprint, and self, as everything is finite. Even the veiled green tears of grief.

Atomic Ghost

Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age

John Bradley (Editor)

John Bradley

"The sun was slow in arriving that morning though it was no longer dark, was light enough, and having been born with good eyes, we..." (more)

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

August 6, 1945: a day when the world was changed. Thirteen thousand people were killed instantly in Hiroshima, and 90 percent of their city was obliterated. Three days later death again rained down, this time at Nagasaki, with radiation poisoning and slow deaths following. The ghosts of these two Japanese cities move like shadows over Americans, who fear for the safety of their children and the survival of the planet. They are also fearful and angry about official lies about the impact of nuclear testing on health and the environment. The poems in this collection speak honestly and elegantly on these points and more, exposing the nuclear fear that has spread into the core of our being. This is poetry as witness, from the conception of nuclear power to its testing ("talking of the danger/as if it were not ourselves/as if we were testing anything else," writes Adrienne Rich) to its inevitable, unbelievable conclusion. In these poems of witness, protest, prayer, and, perhaps, redemption, we hear compelling voices of the human spirit. Important for poetry collections.

Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia

Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Over 100 poets participate in a strong collection of reflections on the nuclear age, providing personal views of atomic politics and human costs. From Adrienne Rich to William Dickey plus a host of lesser-known but equally-talented poets, Atomic Ghost is rich in imagery and assertiveness. -- Midwest Book Review

CONTENTS   


(—now at Google Books with hot links. Click on the word "Contents" and a list with links will pop up. I've posted a few links here as well. For ages, it was almost impossible to find this book. The reason why I posted the list and reviews here was because it had almost disappeared from sight. Great to see its contents available on the internet as it's an important anthology—one I'm proud to be in. Thank you John Bradley for your vision. MH)

The Testimony Of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Florence Anthony

Bringing Zeus To His Knees by Antler [pseud.]

Atomic Ghost by John Balaban

They're Family Men by Ellen Bass

Wine From Bordeaux by Sujata Bhatt

Deeper Than A Dream by Peter Blue Cloud

Sailors Shielding Their Eyes During Atomic Bomb Test, Bikini by John Bradley

Preparing The Nets At New Stuyahok by John Brandi

Wahsah Zeh (war Dance) - As Long As The Grass by Joseph Bruchac

Why I'm In Favor Of A Nuclear Freeze by Christopher Buckley

Eight-legged Colt, Chernobyl by Jerah Chadwick

Prayer For A Future Beyond Ideology And War by Kelly Cherry

Hiroshima Day At The Riviera Coffeeshop by Andrea Collins

To An Unborn Child by Allan Cooper

Bomb by Gregory Corso

Armageddon by William Dickey

Secret Symbols by Hilda Doolittle

Ground Zero by Sharon Lura Edens Doubiago

Why I Think About Hiroshima And Nagasaki by Edward A. Dougherty

The Cocked Finger by Stephen P. Dunn

The Way Light Bends by William Daniel Ehrhart

Another Kimono by Nancy Eimers

The Planet Krypton by Lynn Emanuel

The Fish Dream by John Engels

Mushroom Clouds by John Robert Engman

The Garden Shukkei-en by Carolyn Forche

Radiation by Margaret Ferguson Gibson

Plutonian Ode by Allen Ginsberg

These Are The Word Wounds by Daniela Gioseffi

Harry S Truman Library, Independence, Missouri by Diane Glancy

Shadow by Patricia Goedicke

A Dream Of The Closeness Of Venus by James Roscoe, Jr. Grabill

The Lightning by James Roscoe, Jr. Grabill

What The End Is For (grand Forks, North Dakota) by Jorie Graham

The Half-life Of Sorrow by Roger Greenwald

The Atom Bum by William Henry, Jr. Greenway

Prayer For Continuation by Susan Griffin

Origami by Jay Griswold

The Bath: August 6, 1945 by Kimiko Hahn

Dream Of The Hair-burning Smell by Jana Harris

N by William Heyen

The Message by Jeffrey Hillard

A Prayer For Men And Women by Linda Hogan

Psalm by Peter Huchel

Late Spring In The Nuclear Age by Andrew Hudgins

Country Of Origin by Maureen Hurley

Simultaneously by David Ignatow

Green Light by Rolf Jacobsen

High Altitude Photo Of Hiroshima (circa 1944) by Kent Johnson

Trilobytes by Kent Johnson

Directions For Carrying Explosive Nuclear Wastes Through ... by June Jordan

Questions by Marc Kaminsky

After The Neutron by Terence Keenan

Waiting For The Invasion by Barbara Kingsolver

The Fundamental Project Of Technology by Galway Kinnell

How To Survive Nuclear War by Maxine W. Kumin

When We Say 'hiroshima' by Kurihara Sadako

A Liturgy For Trinity by Barbara La Morticella

The Garden by Dorianne Laux

Gathered At The River by Denise Levertov

The Horse by Philip Levine

Nevada Red Blues by Adrian C. Louis

The Crab-apple Crisis by George Macbeth

In The Shadow Of The Poisoned Wind by Jack Marshall

Terminal Colloquy by Charles Martin

War Resisters' Song by Thomas Mcgrath

Opening Day by David Mckain

Utilities Advertisement In The Wake Of Three Mile Island by Gary Metras

Sputyen Duyvil by Honor Moore

Uranium by Robert Morgan

The Hibakusha's Letter by David Mura

Tulum Saw The Coming by Alan Napier

The Radio Talk This Morning by Lorine Niedecker

Shoulders by Naomi Shihab Nye

When by Sharon Olds

In This Third Year Of Reagan, My 27th Year by Peter Oresick

An Army Of Lovers by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

Oppenheimer by Antonia Quintana Pigno

For Harry S Truman In Hell by David Ray

Rose Bay Willow Herb by Judy Ray

For Ethel Rosenberg by Adrienne Cecile Rich

Trying To Talk With A Man by Adrienne Cecile Rich

Black Beauty, A Praise by David William Romtvedt

Eating Dinner At My Sister's by David William Romtvedt

Creation by Benjamin Alire Saenz

Memorandum by Nanao Sakaki

Chernobyl by Mary Jo Salter

Welcome To Hiroshima by Mary Jo Salter

Nuclear Winter by Nicholas Samaras

A Vigil At A Missile Silo by Mark Sanders

Tale Before The End Of The World by Maurya Simon

Strategic Air Command by Gary Snyder

Vapor Trails by Gary Snyder

Sunday Afternoon At Fulham Palace by Elizabeth Spires

At The Bomb Testing Site by William Edgar Stafford

When The Vacation Is Over For Good by Mark Strand

Shadow by Stephanie Strickland

Return To Hiroshima by Lucien Stryk

Silence At The End Of The World by Amber Coverdale Sumrall

Destruction by Takahashi Shinkichi

Explosion by Takahashi Shinkichi

Land Of Little Sticks, 1945 by James Tate

At The Makeshift Aid Station by Toge Sankichi

August 6, 1950 by Toge Sankichi

The Shadow by Toge Sankichi

Hurricane Season by Edwina Trentham

Of Simple Intent by Pamela Marie Uschuk

Early Morning Test Light Over Nevada, 1955 by Robert Vasquez

The Hell Mural: Panel 1 by Ronald W. Wallace

Advice To A Prophet by Richard Wilbur

Strategies For Survival (for The Post-nuclear Children) by Beryle Williams

Tar by Charles Kenneth Williams

High Noon At Los Alamos by Eleanor Wilner

May 28, 1945 by S. L. Wisenberg

The Lamb Of Peace, The Ram Of War by William Witherup

Mervyn Clyde Witherup (b. July 14, 1910 - D. May 12, 1988) by William Witherup

On The Eve Of Our Mutually Assured Destruction by Carolyn D. Wright

Because Of Duties, Zimmer Had Forgotten The Forest by Paul Zimmer

But Bird by Paul Zimmer

-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

A review in The Journal of Environmental Education

Another review: University of Oklahoma.

What's interesting it to see where it was reviewed: the Los Alamos Study Group, United States Air Force Academy in Colorado,

Listed under Los Alamos Study Group Since 1989, the Los Alamos Study Group community—our staff and board, volunteers, interns, and supporters—has consistently provided leadership on nuclear disarmament and related issues in New Mexico. Not infrequently, we also have provided leadership nationally as well. Our work includes research and scholarship (central to all we do), education of decisionmakers, providing an information clearinghouse for journalists, organizing, litigating, and advertising. We place particular emphasis on the education and training of young activists and scholars.
Our careful, reasoned approach has gained us many friends, and built bridges even with people in the nuclear labs and plants. Since September 11, 2001, our work has increasingly placed nuclear weapons in the context of aggression abroad and the militarization of our society at home.

The Study Group is based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Our board of directors includes both New Mexico and national members, and the work of our staff is supplemented by the contributions of interns and volunteers. We are supported largely by individual donations. We welcome your questions, participation, and support.

War, Literature & the Arts: an Interntational Journal—from the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Turning Away From the Blast: Formsof Nuclear Protest Poetry

There's a fleeting reference in Literature of Nuclear Nevada | ONE; and in 2001, someone from Knox College, GA, did a performance piece based on lined from the anthology.

It too is listed under Miami Universities Libraries, but not linked to House on Via Gombito; at the Chicago Public Library, and the National Library of Australia.

It's also available at Cornell. What this suggests to me is that it's on class reading lists. I founded it listed in a history bibliography at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, on a UCLA syllabus for Winter, 2013, and elsewhere.

More on John Bradley

AT THE CENTER OF A BIRD'S BACK EINSTEIN SLEEPS

My aunt says the millennium is at hand.

She strokes my cheek, wants me to believe, be saved,

reunited "upstairs" when the time comes,

while on T.V., a modern-day Elmer Gantry preaches a concoction

   of science and myth—anthropomorphic bible-thumping.

It's the tenth anniversary of Jonestown, Greneda.

I have not received communion since the Vietnam war.

For this, I will spend an unspecified amount of time in purgatory,

my aunt says. But there are graver sins I have committed

which I tell no one. I watch re-runs of Kennedy shot over and over.

After 25 years, grief unfurls anew and I am ten years old again.

The sacred volcanos of Peru and Guatemala are littered with corpses.

In the Peten Itza jungle, near the sacred city of Tikal, saraguato monkeys howl,

making no distinction between exiled guerillas, and the invading army—

Uzis bought with U.S. dollars. AK-47's. In the jungle the Cold War continues.

In the ceiba trees scarlet macaws scream warning to thrumming insects.

Oblivious leaf-cutter ants carve low tunnels through the underbrush.

I never get used to the guns. In the highlands I never saw boys or men—

only women and babies waiting under the volcanic shadows of Atitlán.

On a shining path deep in the Andes, friends carrying medical supplies

are stopped by leftist Sendero Luminoso terrorists on horseback

who let them go when they answer each question right.

Having passed the test, they feel reborn. Their path leads forward still.

Like with Kennedy, I cannot erase or help the blood

of lawyer Manuel Febres-Flores migrating to the sea.

My Peruvian friend said don't look, but it was too late

as we sped off through the Chorillos tunnel to safety.

The TV news fills in the details. He went to buy a newspaper.

His crime was that he was a good lawyer on the "wrong" side.

I have committed this to memory, and I have no words

for bearing witness to the casual departure of life.

There are no front lines in the jungle, the cordilleras, or here.

The Japanese woman warns me never to sleep

at the foot of the bed, or I will have terrible dreams.

During this harvest of apocryphal nights, I learn I have "thin boundaries"

because I dream of snipers in the jungle, and wake up on the floor

crawling toward the safety of closets. I worry about borderline

madness but there are those in power who don't dream. Ever.

Instead, they bring us nightmares. Names of horses.

Before the attack on Hiroshima, an ex-pilot boasted

how he dropped warning leaflets written in English.

He said they were like falling snow, or "window,"

the metal filaments they used to avoid electronic surveillance

while flying in enemy space. He said they named the bombs

and planes after children: Fat Man, Little  Boy, Enola Gay.

I wasn't born yet when this happened

but I keep making origami cranes to heal something in myself.

There are thin boundaries between water, air, and space.

Point in time. Crushed beneath the burden of air, fish drown.

On the swing set, I heard angels striking matches in dry summer grass.

The Hibakusha, the first to witness bright plasma clouds and shadow

are nearly all gone now. At the center of a bird's back Einstein sleeps.

Antichrist arrives in the form of invasion.

When the last condor dies, who will strip it clean of flesh

and make a quena flute from the feathers of its wings?

1986
rev. 1987 & 1989

SIXTH OF AUGUST

SIXTH OF AUGUST

The personality of the dead woman in the storage room escapes
from boxes of silk scarves, photographs, letters
cellulose toys, yellow mother of pearl buttons and cloth scraps.
Inside her white plastic purse;
a checkbook, unclaimed raffle tickets,
a tiny snapshot of a girl who still sends her love;
an envelope dated 1937,
some eight-cent stamps and a life insurance policy.

On this 40th anniversary of Light,
I pull stamps of Einstein and Eisenhower apart.
Glued on top of a glib Eisenhauer grinning seven times
a haunted Einstein broods in purple; the color of mourning.
Beneath them, postage stamps of Apollo on the moon,
black-wreathed earth against the sun;
the birth of Man in space.

When I was three, the linoleum to cover the stairs
was put in the storage room to change it from green to red,
my uncle told me. And so it did.
I admired the miracles that happened in darkness.
In that same darkness, copper pennies
dropped into the piggybank turned into steel.
Dressed in khaki-green, my uncle tossed me into the air
and the known world spun past my forehead.
He held a suitcase of darkness in his hand.

Now, I've gone and brought the dead woman's things into light.
A photograph of her husband holding a silver-plated trophy
by the tall grey horse at Longacre track:
He stares at me with such frankness, that with his passing
I feel the loss of an intimate stranger.
The bent and tarnished trophy rests in thick dust.

When I wear the clothing of the dead,
they see glimpses of light again.
The poet's shirt gives me strange dreams
but I forget the words by morning.

Rotted with age, the boxes of yarn
in this half-light makes tufts like the manes
of cloth horses I ride in my dreams
where the landscape grows wilder with each visit.

August 6, 1985
rev. 1986

1987 San Francisco Bay Guardian, 2nd Place
         Thread Winding the Loom, CPITS anthology
         The Paper
 1995 Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age, ( version 2, below)

 see my post,  Atomic Ghost

AMERICAN HIBAKUSHA

AMERICAN HIBAKUSHA
       —for Carolyn Forché 
         Hibakusha is the name the survivors of Hiroshima gave to themselves.

I.   The violin's slow scale
climbs above the beat
of the metronome,
patterning mountains of notes,
increasing in tempo.

II.   A child under the alders

stares at the liquid leaves
that hide small cones—
brown, like river debris.

III.    A sonic pitch
loosens the violin's strings.

The bow falls slack
and the hand falls silent.

IV.   A pulse of light quickens the sky
The leaves, robbed of their color
sizzle into premature fall. 
Ashes. Burnt decay.

V.  The acrid odor of hair
distracts the woman playing the violin.
Glancing at the mirror,
she watches fascinated,
as the mirror slumps off the wall.

VI.  Vast ridges of light.
No color anywhere—
only a drenched landscape
of saturated light
brushed by fingers of white noise.

 9/1/83 published in nuke notes, Sonoma, county, direct action, coalition, 2/1984, vol. 4, no.6
added 10/16