#fukushima
the cherry blossom blooms brightly
nature smiles on deserted streets
leaving a carpet of pink to colour
the desolate lonely landscape
it's like an empty welcome home
begging for the normality of children
playing among the flowers, commuters
enjoying the colour of a bright spring
morning on their way to work where
work is no longer an option
the trees will fruit from the poison earth
only the birds will enjoy their bounty
man no longer a part of what was once
a home, a life, a sanctuary
Mar 4, 2023
Mar 4, 2023 at 3:46 PM UTC
Erasure & Found Poem from
"On Photography By Teju Cole in april 16th new york times magazine
--
You were The fast moving disaster of a tsunami
added to the slow motion disaster
of a nuclear calamity
Towns flooded
Infrastructure wrecked
Forests splintered
more than 15,000 people dead.
earthquake cut off
my external power supply
Floodwaters damaged my backup generators
Disabled it's cooling system
Overheating ensued
Fuel in three reactor cores melted
Releasing radiation
Everyone saw The water coming in
The roads swept away
Towns and harbors destroyed
Extensive documentary work
was undertaken by photographers
Of the ruins,
Debris,
Cleanup and relief operations
The gut-wrentching scale of destruction
The professionalism of the emergency crews
The fortitude of the survivers
The extreme uncertainty I feel
in our current political moment
helps me understand for the first time
the curious twinship
of mourning and premonition.
Information
about the tragedy
Sorrow for the suffering it caused
Gratitude for the work
that makes sorrow visible
Foreboding about the future.
An alert flashes
your phone
Something terrible has happened
Far away, a flood, an airstrike,
Soon, there's footage of people picking through wreckage
what used to be their homes
It is easy to pity them
Difficult to imagine this will be you
Suddenly bereft of a solid place in the world.
Listening to anything
that touches on the sublime
makes me apprehensive.
Like The silence that greets us
waking in the middle of the night
Apr 17, 2017
Apr 17, 2017 at 12:57 AM UTC