Little poems recall Hiroshima tragedy

Yasuhiko Shigemoto is recalling the day when, aged 15, he first saw the incinerated city of Hiroshima.

"I walked across this bridge and even five days after the bomb it was covered in charred bodies. I had to step over them, but there were so many I walked on someone.

"The river underneath was full of people too, floating like dead fish. There are no words to describe what I felt."

The modest, retired schoolteacher and renowned poet, is now 75.

When, at 55, Shigemoto began to write about the blast, - in which half the children in his school died - he chose the shortest of literary styles: the 17-syllable haiku.

"Japanese haiku poets refused to write about Hiroshima because they thought [the form] was too short," he says.

"But I believe the shortness can be very profound. If you write well, the connotations of haiku, and the ability to stimulate the imagination, is very strong - not like a story at all."

His aunt lost all six of her children in the explosion, and for the rest of her life wandered around clasping a photo album of her family. He wrote this poem for her.

Child in a photo
Old mother murmurs his name
Hiroshima Day.

"People tell me that there is no message in my poems," he says. "I think that's good. I just describe what I see.

"I do this to heal myself, and somehow others get something from it."

On the day the bomb fell, Shigemoto was part of a group of children sent to dig tunnels outside the city.

He was shielded from the blast while working in the hills as his school friends, who were all killed, worked on a different detail in the city centre.

He was burned around his midriff which happened to be exposed when the bomb fell.

Fires raged all around and the walking wounded arrived in the countryside hours later, "like ghosts" with arms stretched out in front begging for water.

"They walked like that because the dangling skin would have stuck to their bodies."

One of the ghosts called his name, but he didn't recognise his classmate because he was so badly burnt.

These experiences, which he calls "the most inhuman in the history of mankind," have been the motivation for most of his 160 poems.