In Articulo Mortis: Poems to the Atomic Bombing

August 9, the day of the bomb.
I tried to reach my home but did not arrive until the dead of night.
Are they here?
Under the fallen debris
Under the light of the moon

The following day I found my seriously injured wife and the corpses of two of my children at the road side.
And my wife told me
About the death of the children (one and four years old)
knowing only recently how to smile
the baby smiles, dying
at her mother’s breast
left on the ground for lack of any shelter
The children attract swarms of flies
Sucking a stick on the brink of death,
he says, this is good,
this is a piece of sugar cane.
My eldest son, a seventh grade student, dies in the air raid shelter.
Under the burning sun
I set out in search of my son’s last earthly drink
Creeping to his mother’s side
he smiles
and draws a final breath
His last night of earthly form
He lies next to his mother
The moonlight touching his face
The moonlight finds them dead,
Two outside
And one inside the shelter.

On August 11, I gathered wood to cremate my children
A dragon fly
stops for an instant
on the corpses of three siblings.
The fire rages and
engulfs two children
pressing up against their older brother.

I collect the ashes early the next morning.
The morning mist
washes over the ashes
of three siblings side by side
How lamentable
the ashes, like flower petals,
of a seven month old infant.

My wife died on August 13 (aged 36)
The tomato in my kimono sleeve is for Hiro-chan, says my wife
as she draws her last breath

I cremated my wife on August 15th, the day that Japan announced its surrender.
After losing everything.
I stand holding
four atomic bomb death certificates.
Arousing myself from the summer grass
I stoke the fire
cremating my wife
The words of surrender
mingle with the flames
of my wife’s funeral pyre.

Atsuyiko Matsuo, Nagasaki