TBT: The Witness
A 1986 Poem Inspired By a Sketch in 'Unforgettable Fire,' A Collection of Sketches By the Survivor of Hiroshima
I’ve been working on a long essay that is part of a manuscript in progress on Jack Kerouac, my own life, and the changes that have taken place across the many decades. I started digging back through earlier notes and writings and remembered the poem below. It appeared in a Rutgers journal called The Anthologist in 1986.
I wrote this poem for a creative writing class at Rutgers taught by Laurie Sheck. Sheck is a marvelous poet and teacher. It was early in the fall semester, and Laurie was looking for ways to open our creative minds. She handed out random images and asked us to respond with a poem. I was given the image above, which was of a young girl left to die by a river after the bomb blast.
I didn’t know the origin of the sketch — she didn’t give us that information — and I submitted a poem about a girl who was raped as the unnamed witness does nothing.
I thought of this poem recently as I was reworking some older poems and working on an essay on nuclear weapons and their impact on our culture and my own views of the world. I reached out to Laurie, who pointed me to the book Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn By Atomic Bomb Survivors. I’m surprised at the poem’s quality — I was just 23, maybe 24. It is not perfect, and I wonder how it would’ve come together had I known what the sketch was actually of.
And yet, the idea of witness and being frozen seems a perfect response. The response of a culture — ours — that has never come to grips with the bomb and its meaning. Perhaps it is true that the bomb helps prevent hundreds of thousands of American military deaths, but it was a blunt instrument of destruction, marking no difference between civilian and soldier.
All I have is the published copy, no drafts, nothing more. Given that today is the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima (it is Aug. 6 in Japan), I thought I would share. My hope is that all of us can ask ourselves what it means to witness.