Creative Writing - Poem

I wrote this poem as a means to express the horrific realities one specific victim faced during the Hiroshima bombing, the person on the steps of the Sumitomo Bank. It captures their thoughts before the bomb exploded, when they thought it was just an average morning. It illustrates what happened in the milliseconds after the bomb went off, when it seemed like the sun was falling. Lastly, the poem creates a vivid image in our minds of what happened after the bomb exploded, for the individual on the bank steps and for so many others that were near the hypocenter of the bomb.

For context, these shadow images are created when an atomic bomb explodes, due to the intense light and heat that spread out from the hypocenter. The shadow images actually show how the surface looked before the nuclear blast. What wasn’t blocked by an object was essentially bleached, making that small area look like a dark shadow.

Poetry is an intriguing art form and is often used as a means of expression of complex, indescribable emotions that everyday language cannot communicate. It can help us understand and appreciate the world around us on a deeper level. The tragedies and horrors witnessed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki fall into nearly all the categories listed above. Sometimes, it’s difficult for the human mind to comprehend what happened on August 6 and August 9, 1945.

“A Shadow So Atomic” is a poem composed in effort to capture the thoughts and observations of the individual sitting on the Sumitomo Bank before and after the atomic bomb detonated above Hiroshima.

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A day of beauty
Sun dancing across my skin
So much activity I could see
Pleasing my soul from within

In a search for money
I had to wait
The sun felt like warm honey
On those steps so quaint

Many reasons I may hold
For my visit to those steps
I had dreams so bold
That the war wouldn’t affect

I sat there
Knowing not the slightest
Of what was soon to fill the air
From those so unrighteous

It fell so abruptly
The sun
Or I thought it was
In a way so unjustly
A second I had none
I left behind a shadow of what once was

Other souls got taken too
Yet their bodies are the remains
Left to carry a burden so true
Holding scars like chains

Around they would run
In horror they would scream
Wishing it would be done
Skin burning like an endless beam

There is nothing within
But carrying the hope to die
Their tears fall on broken skin
Yet how does one cry with no eyes 

In a massacre beyond medieval
From light, darkness becomes the norm
A resemblance of evil
In human form

Stories they will hear
Of the shadow on the stone
Like a mirror
Like a clone

All that was left was a shadow
The last thing I would own
Yet they will never know
That I am the human etched in stone.