This poem by John Arnold was published in #Folio 73 in 2019
Orizuru
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park
Hundreds of them,
maybe a thousand or more –
perhaps as many as those rainbows
of folder paper cranes
trapped behind glass:
schoolkids – eight years old or less,
with clipboards, quizzing foreigners
on their attitudes to war and peace.
And my daughter and I –
seemingly the only western faces –
are at once surrounded.
Hello, how are you? (stiff bows)
What do you think about war?
Oh, it’s bad, very bad.
Do you think there’ll be another war?
I hope not.
What do you think about nuclear bombs?
Bad, very bad.
Still the children come,
yet still a tiny fraction of those
who vanished in a moment
of total light that August dawn.
And still they ask the same again, again.
I want those origami birds
to fly away, to flock and circle
the skeletal remains of that dome.
The Kent & Sussex Poetry Society 