Cross Reference
Jennifer Morales
War Poetry Contest 2010 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention
"Do we all agree that this is Hiroshima?"
He had to be sure. He had to check.
He was a careful man.
I am a proofreader,
a researcher. I get it.
The importance of cross-referencing.
He asked his crew, "Do we all agree
that this is Hiroshima?" He asked.
Check the map. Check
the sources. Check.
"Do we all agree that this is Hiroshima?" he asked
in that minute just before it wasn't Hiroshima any more.
Do we all agree
that this is Hiroshima?
One wants to be sure.
The people
on the ground melted into each other
and one
wants to be sure that they were
the right
people, that is,
the people of Hiroshima and not
the people
of Kyoto.
Kyoto was where the United States Secretary of War had had
his honeymoon.
So it was struck from the list, the list
of good targets.
The Secretary of War so loved Kyoto that
it was wrong to bomb it.
When a place is graced by one's first taste of consensual
sex, it's hard
to blow it up. I get it.
So the pilot needed to ask, so that the wife of the Secretary of War
would not have to go to sleep on ashes
or have her sweet red mouth stained by the taste of lead
or see her wedding photos shot,
reshot, shot now in reverse, positive, negative. What was
white is now black. What was black is now white.
The positive is now negative,
so
the pilot needed to ask,
Do we all agree that this is Hiroshima?
Do we
all agree?
