Hiroshima
The crane calls me home. Hiroshima,
with my checkered mats of loose-leaf green,
I feed her in the snow and rain. Spring yields
and summer rains pelt my newborn rice into coin.
Aged farmers in pairs, in their married cadence
bent through years into jackknifed broken form,
turning newborn rice into coin.
They call me home. Hiroshima,
my pink petal silks in spring cobweb
all the patchwork market ways.
Folding willow trees line my streets
and sway like silk creased gowns.
Red bobbins and violet combs,
for black-haired bonnets in elegant form,
dress my daughters in wedding folds.
They blend into the August paper twists
folded up in rainbow stuttered steps.
—They said it was the rain.
They said it was the seeping wind.—
Once a year, remembrance of the bomb.
In good faith, West pardons her sons,
and mine are left blunt-edged, quiet.
My vertebrae stands upward bare
and breaks the blue-sealed sky catacomb,
like tree limbs sketch-mark the winter gray.
Sketch marks across rainbow-frosted grays,
paper twists of crane lining building bones.
Shadows burrowed in my yellowed ribs,
these cement shadow stairs, death-frosted
stairs famous to West for gawker's guilt.
I burrow in today, burrow out the casket wall
to sons and daughters buried too short, too young
under the atomic mushroom wing.
The remembrance of their ash lingers here, bare
through yellowed casket ribs and rainbow twists,
at once too anonymous and too precise.
The day only ends in breathing,
—once in, now out, again and out—
till night folds in and ribs unclench.
—I found it was the rain.
I found it was the culling wind.—
The crane calls me home from this.
With ruffled mask of grey-white rust
she feeds me in the rain, the winter rain
and carpets of snow unfolding across my vertebrae
to seal asleep until I begin again. Spring yields
and summer rains pelting newborn rice into coin.
The broken cadence of my farmers, aged in twos,
turning green rice carpets into coin.
I am as was, will be.
Of wet carton carpet greens,
pink cobweb grace and folding trees.
I lie awake
with my paper rainbow folded wings.
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