Hiroshima
All quiet in the morning.
All up and ready to start the day.
Children getting ready for school.
Wives making food for the family.
Office goers on their way.
And suddenly out of nowhere
Came the messenger of death and destruction.
August 6th, 1945 the time was 8.15am.
The first atomic nuclear bomb fell.
The huge ball of fire rose.
In seconds lakhs of people were dead and injured.
Mangled, limbs ripped apart.
Horror worse than death.
Skin peeling off, eyes popping out.
Man has never seen so much destruction in so short a time.
A radius of 2 km turned to ashes in minutes.
Nobody knew who was dead and who was alive.
Everybody was searching for their loved ones in this confusion.
The people alive were mad in the heat.
They looked up to the sky
Black rain full of radiation was pouring down.
People were parched and dying, they looked up and drank the black rain.
Every drop was poison, every drop was death.
What harm the fire couldn't, radiation did.
What harm the impact couldn't, radiation did for years.
The Atomic Bomb Dome ruins still stands as a testament to the horror.
The Peace Memorial Museum houses the tattered and torn clothes of the victims.
The photographs of the mayhem reminds us of the cruelty.
So much pain, so much suffering documented in the Museum.
The melted metal utensils in the heat, the appliances,
All a memory of a heinous crime.
But Hiroshima overcame all odds
And stands tall, resilient at every step.
Hiroshima stands tall and stands for peace.
Dr. Paramita Mukherjee Mullick
Dr. Paramita Mukherjee Mullick is a scientist, literary curator and an award-winning poet. She has twelve books. Her poems have been translated into forty-five languages and books in Spanish, French, Chinese and Croatian. She promotes peace, multilingual and indigenous poetry and her poems make children and adults aware about conservation and climate change. She is the Initiator and President of the Mumbai Chapter of IPPL and also the Cultural Convenor and Literary Coordinator (West India) of ISISAR.