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.
Orizuru, by John Arnold
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