Random Freewrite 2: Week of 4/17/11

Hiroshima

Draft 4 

The crane calls me home. Hiroshima,

with checkered mats of loose-leaf green,

fed by 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,

picking rice to turn to coin.

They call me home. Hiroshima,

pink petal silks in spring cobweb

all the patchwork market ways.

Folding willow trees line the streets

and sway like silk creased gowns.

Red bobbins and violet combs,

for black-haired bonnets in elegant form,

dress daughters in wedding folds.

August blends in with paper twists

folded up in rainbow stuttered steps.

Paper cranes recalling bombs.

—They said it was the rain.

They said it was the seeping wind.—

Outside the park of hope and peace,

where dignitaries and somber tourists drift,

old buildings and their hollowed vertebrae

stands upward bare and breaks the catacomb of the sky,

like tree limbs sketch-marking the winter grays.

Color only comes in paper, the twists of crane

line building bones, one thousand strong in rainbow squares.

Paper prayers for shadows burrowed in cement walls,

where the shapes of heads and shoulders linger,

flash-burnt like human pottery.

If I could but burrow out from casket walls

sons and daughters buried too short, too young,

or too long, in bleeding skins and ash-burnt lungs.

August lingers every year,

at once too anonymous and too precise.

These days only end 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 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.