Nagasaki

Publication Instance Details #19

Publication Overview

Translation	Is Multilingual	Explicit Irish Context?	Ekphrasis	Has Paratext?	Reference to News, Media or Technology
No	No	No	No	No	Yes

Details

Human Rights Issues	War HR & Weapons of Mass Destruction (incl. nuclear)
War / Genocide Referenced	War: Second World War
Languages	English
Genre	Short Lyric
Medium	Print Anthology
Notes	This poem contains otherworldly and unsettling imagery of the post-nuclear city of Nagasaki, after the bomb was dropped in August 1945. The speaker of the poem is a visitor to the city, who encounters various characters who have experienced the bombing, including a geisha who is listening to herself on the radio, who 'navigated the stars out of her dead mother's womb' and a passer-by who tells the speaker to 'panic'. The speaker describes the 'tail-fin of a high-altitude American bomber' - clearly a reference to the plane that dropped the bomb on Nagasaki - as the 'second horseman of the Apocalypse', otherwise known as war itself.