President Harry Truman’s Eldest Grandson Offers a Thousand Paper Cranes
from the City of Hiroshima to a Bronx, New York High School
The high schoolers are listening to the grandson of the dead President
who dropped not one but two atomic bombs on the Japanese.
A lovely, insolent child with henna-highlighted hair raises a hand.
Asks if survivors feel any bitterness after all this time.
Three white-haired women are seated onstage in folding chairs.
There is a microphone center stage. The arithmetic
of ages in 1945 is calculated by the less math-phobic.
One of the women rises. Walks to the microphone.
Says, in English, Remember. In jeans and a Giants sweatshirt
the grandson hands off the chains of origami birds
as if time and space and memory are folded into shapes
that say what they say, which can never be enough.
From the rear of the gymnasium a rude noise and laughter
like lightning then thunder after an apocalypse.
About Roy Bentley
Roy Bentley has ruined me for nearly any other poet’s work. A Bentley poem keeps yielding layer on layer, reading after reading, and not just technique but resonant meaning, the wisdom I go to poetry for.
How kind, Kathleen. (I’m humbled–which is hard to do.)