Becoming a father changed all that...

Unidentified girls, Spanish Civil War

My friend, Robert asked me one day,

What did Hiroshima mean to you as a young man?’

 *

Well … nothing really, I’d never thought much about it, I said,

back then in 1945, I was only fifteen and patriotic,

I mean, I saw around me bomb damaged houses,

streets of them and lots of temporarily bomb-shocked humans, vacant-eyed …

scrambled-minded wrecks shuffling along the streets of my home town.

I heard the pilot-less flying bomb one night, its engine suddenly quiet overhead,

felt my heart thumping loudly in that sudden … very frightening silence

I hear it yet at times and if I should perchance forget,

I can Google it onto my computer screen - if I wish…

 *

Ground Zero for Hiroshima, August of that same year …

Oh yes! They reaped Churchill’s promised whirlwind

and that was fine by me.

 *

Becoming a father changed all that, it sure changed me…

it gave Hiroshima a meaning, a meaning that was thrust upon me one day

when I imagined my daughters there, back then, and thankfully

I’d lost my soul-destroying callowness…

 *

Now I’m part of that history, have changed, am changing now

with still more to come …

so in a way, Hiroshima had a point,

for all of us, I’d say.

 *

Dennis Crompton © 1997

(first published www.denniscrompton.wordpress.com 2013)