Kaddish - Mixed War Poem

In the cool retrospectives of our museums
We recapitulate,
Tabulating statistics.
Compared to the Black Death,
Dresden, all said and done,
Was an ocean's raindrop.
Hiroshima has no holocaust to outcompete
With Genghis Khan.
Even so,
In the inventories of our statistics,
The souls are too numerous to be lamented
One by one.
We cannot say kaddish
For each and every.
In the streets of Dresden, the German survivors
Collected wedding rings in buckets.
The wedding bands,
Engraved with the identities of the married,
Would help identify those many of the dead
Who no longer had faces.
I have a pocket calculator and can, at need,
Compute and recompute the actual numbers.
But what they really mean I cannot say.
Beyond my child's misfortune,
My mother's death,
I have no gauge at all
For human suffering.
The sundry catastrophes
Are as mute to me as the dictionary,
Saying no more to me of human tears
Than words at random chosen from the page:
Pinecone, wombat, blancmange.
This is the limit of my eloquence on death,
The death of millions.
This limitation
Is not cultural.
I share it with my entire species.
In the haystacks of our holocausts
The individual needle goes unsung.

Nagasaki - Mixed War Poem

Nagasaki is a child
Still young enough to believe in rainbows.
Her household has been deleted.
Now she survives alone
If living beyond the black rain
Can be said to be survival.
Her teeth are loose,
Her gums are raw and bleeding
And her hair
Is already starting to fall out.
Her story
Is too sad to continue.

Hiroshimam - Mixed War Poem

Hiroshima is a woman, her expectation
The daily ration,
Survival on short commons
In the safety of an obscure and unimportant city
Nowhere near a battlefield.
Then the universe
Gives her a nudge.
The fireball
Is a red-hot furnace
Slammed directly into her eyes.
The blast
Is a utility pole
Rammed up her privacy.
She has nothing sacred.
She is one big meathook rape,
Helpless to defend herself.
Her back is broken,
Her hair on fire,
Her teeth displaced.
Her nose is a red truncation.
The caprice of demons chortles in her flesh.
She dies in slow eternities,
Forgetting,
As she dies,
The colors black and white,
Her father's name,
And what exactly that it was
Her mother's milk once tasted of.
The cherry blossom will no longer bloom for her.
Dying,
She forgets her very name,
So you, if you so choose,
May give her one of yours.

Tokyo - Mixed War Poem

Tokyo is an old man now,
Who has stumbled beyond possession of a name.
His personal patch of riverside,
His burns unit for the moment,
Is lit by clouds reflecting lurid red.
Old, he finds his recollections failing.
He cannot remember how it is
That his skin became pork crackling.
He has no understanding of why it is
That when he calls
Not one member of his many-peopled family
Comes to his aid.
The consuming flames are reflected from the river waters
For many hours.
A city is not the easiest thing to burn.
His life, deceasing,
Earns him no paragraph.
His death
Never gets its movie.

Dresden - Mixed War Poem

Dresden is the good German,
Taxpayer and scout master,
Keeping a low profile for the duration,
Safe in a civilian city made of wooden houses
Possessed of absolutely no strategic value.
Dresden (his personal name is Fritz)
Is a productive member of the German middle class,
Fond of beer but always home for tea.
Blood pressure a little high, to tell the truth,
But otherwise unremarkable.
He and his wife are together at the end,
Being boiled alive in the water tank
They thought would offer refuge from the flames.
Of the many ways there are to die,
This one
Cannot be said to be user-friendly.

War poem - Mixed

War poem on destruction of Dresden,Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A poem on the mass murder of defenseless civilians by the British and the Americans during World War Two.

This poem, Lumberjacked Cities, is part of the Genghis Lotus Poetry Collection, a selection of poems free to read online. The Genghis Lotus poems are hosted at two locations, genghislotus.com and zenvirus.com/genghis-lotus/. Webmaster for both sites is poet Hugh Cook, born in Britain, educated in New Zealand, and the author of, amongst other works, the fantasy series Chronicles of an Age of Darkness.

The poem focuses on a phase during the Second World War in which Britain and America moved into a mode of mass murder, gratuitously slaughtering the civilian populations of, amongst other cities, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

You can, if it suits you, create an elegant intellectual justification for these war crimes. I would suggest, however, that constructing such a thesis would not be the optimal use of the human intellect.

If you were to construct such a thesis, it would have to deal with, to start with, the fact that the British and the Americans had committed themselves to the position that they would accept nothing short of absolute surrender.

In other words, the destruction of entire cities was a strategy conducted in a context in which the allies (that is, the British and the Americans) had deliberately chosen to preclude any possibility of a negotiated surrender.

During the Cold War, when the West was gearing up for global thermonuclear warfare, there was a political need to justify the use of nuclear weapons, and, for this reason, the West never confronted either the human cost of the destruction of entire civilian cities or the war crimes committed by their leaders.

In particular, the nuclear annihilation of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was often construed, in the West, as an act of virtue. The virtue of hard necessity. Murder not as a crime but as a duty.

If you doubt the truth of this statement, then you could try checking out the archives of any newspaper of record (that is to say, any reputable broadsheet newspaper) for issues round about 6 August and 9 August, the anniversaries of the atomic bombing of, respectively, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki get a lot of publicity in the West and the firebombing of Tokyo is, of course, remembered in Japan.

Dresden is part of a pattern. This city was made, for the most part, of wooden buildings. When these were set alight by incendiary bombs, the resulting firestorm was so fierce that, in some cases, people had the air sucked out of their very lungs.

Horror does not require nuclear war. All horror requires is a miscue with a pot of boiling water in the kitchen.

If you're interested in learning more about the human cost of the destruction of Dresden, an easy way to get acquainted with the topic of the destruction of Dresden, a city of wooden building which were set alight by incendiary is to read Kurt Vonnegut's science fiction novel Slaughterhouse Five.

During the Second World War, Vonnegut, an American of German extraction, served in the American army, and was captured by the Germans.

As a prisoner of war, he was accommodated in a slaughterhouse, that is to say, a place for butchering animals. This place was one of the few places where survival was possible in the firestorm that consumed the city of Dresden.

While Vonnegut's novel is SF, it is written from the sober perspective of someone who was there, who was at ground zero when the city was incinerated, and who saw his duty as being to tell the tale of that event.

Mixed War Poem:
Kaddish
Nagasaki
Hiroshima
Tokyo
Dresden