It
remains possible to believe there
was
nothing anyone could do about
the
melted bottles, burnt coins etc … as for the
corpses
lying in the streets and wreckage
of
Nagasaki, we tend to forget how
the
body resists history; we pretend that
Koreans
look different, or
that
victims are all the same, even when they
remained
silent, we could hear their voices,
scattered
across the unbelievably blue sky, hanging
in
trees, or from twisted crosses, populating
the
horror invisibly, keeping time, giving
ruins
a human aspect, a curtain of dead flesh
longer
than a shroud, sadder
than
silent bells, more dignified than
any
surrender, never to be buried like the
others.
One
day we shall know their names, the
reason
for their being there, that morning. Death
is
just another criminal, an adversary
that
does not need a motive,
although
we may wish to assign it one. The
many
cries, the stunned desolation of this
Japanese
port town in the moonlight – its
people
scattered like broken glass. Even the walls that
survived
bear shadows like execution drawings, and inside
the
museum, the pathetic legacy of
atomic
testing around the world lingers. We’re still
bombing,
while they sue for peace. Of course, it’s
very
hard to know who suffered the most. Was it the
few
who remained to bear witness, or the
Koreans
who disappeared? It’s hard to know what exactly
survived.
There
among the dead horses and railway girders,
was
an abandonment of sanity, from which
nothing
could be salvaged, despite the crows
we
saw circling in the blood-red skies. After this,
could
anything grow from evil? There was nothing left to
do.
Crows
are sacred in many cultures. That morning, as they
flew
about, making their raids, we sat with our heads
down
between shame and annihilation. Meaning existed
in
their grim and tidy circles, their flexing
flocks
and dusted beaks. They grew fat and sick
from
the flesh of the Koreans. We watched
the
dim carnival play itself out, while the
sky
burned into stillness
and
the shrieks grew faint. Scarily, we
ate
rice cakes sent from surrounding towns, as
the
rare medics wandered about dispensing water. Our
eyeballs
remained fixed in a groundward stare. Out
of
nowhere, the crows came again, seeking
the
remains, the plastic souls of those
Korean
dead with no names. They were no longer simply
corpses.
They
became ghosts that haunt our city still. We
ate
rice cakes that may or may not have carried
the
crows’ radiation. They ate the
eyeballs.
About the author
Davey Dreamnation (1972–?) is an Australalian musician, vocalist, pirate and record-label owner who now lives 'in the third person'. View his full biography .
