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My husband and I join our thoughts with those who were impacted by the war, from soldiers to mothers and fathers to children and grandchildren to peace activists, who were my friends, and with whom we marched shoulder to shoulder in protest. The war affected my friends, students, snatched from hopeful prospects of college graduation; these youth died, were disabled and are now forgotten. The war was a vanity project that lined the pockets of politicians and generals and the war’s administrators It affected the country as the first example of an unnecessary war fought to merely use our young people for the “farmed” enrichment of others: it created a depression in America that we have yet to recover from. The concept of an unwinnable, unnecessary, cruel gambit that has given us all a deep distrust in government.
We write to those who died a half a century ago. And we also write for the present and the future, to the Wall, with the admonition that without careful, judicial discrimination, involving discussions in the Congress, it could be in our future to submit yet again to vainglorious politicians, who find in war, a financial market and a distraction from their personal mismanagement of democracy.
Sandra Keith
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I want to apologize to those of you who sacrificed your life in the name of Greed, not knowing what you were getting into & for whom you were fighting under the false pretext of “democracy”….
To those of you who suffer from PTSD, from the effects of Agent Orange. To those of you who suffer from addictions & are homeless as well as to those who are unable to exorcise the ghost s of the past….
There isn’t much to say to give you comfort; I was in junior high school when this began & in college when the political action in Vietnam ended…
Although the government wants us to forget, You’re not forgotten; and again I apologize for the suffering you endured.
Thankfully Veterans For Peace is working to educate the people and put an end to the u.s. of Oil Companies endless wars of Greed!
To Anyone Who Cares:
As a veteran and as a human being I weep for the future. We are planning to spend 2 trillion dollars replacing all of our nuclear weapons and their support systems. We are planning to spend 1.5 trillion dollars on the failed F-35 fighter jet. We have a President who doesn’t care about the future of the children of our or any country. The myth of America was never real for a lot of people but it at least presented a hopeful goal to work toward…democracy, equality and peace for all the people of the world. The plans to spend our wealth on weapons of mass destruction instead of a bountiful society shows our true and evil priorities.
Larry Kirschner.
“Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.”
― Omar N. Bradley
There is but one step from the grotesque to the horrible. –Arthur Conan Doyle
Grotesque Arms
use of nuclear weapons will always have
grotesque catastrophic consequences
(malformed, deformed, misshapen,
misproportioned, distorted, twisted, gnarled)
hubris, fear, hatred and ugly ignorance
plant radioactive seeds for all human time
a super-heated tan-colored wind sweeps
all possibility of love or compassion aside
bones of the corpses disappear in
a flash of bright light and time
the dead won’t hear the following
loud stillness that comes briefly and goes
even the smell of skin dripping from
a face is enveloped in the stillness
unawakened children make no cry
sleeping breath sucked into the combustion
there remains no place for Sadako’s
cranes to land after history is gone
Ending Stories
there are origin stories
there are ending stories
of how much easier it is
to take life than to create it
prometheus damned us
with his stolen fire
is there music for ghosts
to listen to after dying
post apocalypse the children learn to
play scissors, paper, rock without hands
the rattlesnake asks “what did you expect”
I gave you plenty of warning
被爆者
in Japanese
Hibakusha
explosion-affected people
sounds so simple
radiation burns froze their
skin in keloid poses
but it is our hearts that
need to be thawed
because we are not
explosion-affected people
little boy little girl
in defiance of current
theories of the physical universe
on August 6, 1945
ten thousand paper peace cranes
flew out of a black hole
in the sky
above
Hiroshima
overcoming Death,
the destroyer of the worlds
— for Sadako Sasaki
(Little Boy was the name of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Sadako Sasaki was a two year old girl living in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped. Ten years later she developed leukemia. She heard of a Japanese folk tale that if you folded 1,000 origami paper cranes the gods would grant your wish. She died before she finished but she inspired a peace movement in Japan that continues. The black hole reference is a play on modern black hole theory and the statement made by the pilot of the plane dropping the bomb. He said that the explosion drew up so much dirt that there appeared to be a black hole in the sky. Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, called ‘the father
