Beach Landing, Iwo Jima

They didn’t shoot at us.  A silent scene
until we clogged the beach, and then–all hell,
potato masher hand grenades, machine
gun fire, artillery.  I swear each shell
passed close enough you could reach up and catch
it like a ball.  I crawled across black sand,
and used each corpse for cover.  Don’t attach
yourself, is what I learned.  Push it down and
crawl in a hole.  Go numb, and you’ll survive,
maybe, as I survived.  I didn’t hate
the man who charged at me with his bayonet.
I crouched and shot him dead so I could live.
But the photo in his helmet cut my heart.
A child smiling at me.  And then I wept.

U.S. Marine, Iwo Jima, 1945

from Tongue of War, Tony Barnstone  Tony is a friend of mine through our translation association [ALTA].  These are original to him, not translations. The are constructed from the journals, diaries, news accounts and oral histories of the (mostly) men who fought, or were caught,  in the Pacific in WW II

Grace Under Pressure

When the potato masher hand grenade
flew in the hollow, Mark, the quiet boy,
looked at me with such sorrow.  Then he lay
down on the thing.  He knew his death would buy
our lives, and so he spent it all, just tossed
his future in the pot like a big spender
in Vegas.  Damn him, who can pay the loss
off?  I can’t.  “Neither borrower nor lender”
was what my pop taught me.  For what he gave
with rag doll arms spread wide when the bomb blew
him off the earth.  I kissed his dirty face,
closed his dead eyes.  I knew I had to live
my life a cleaner way, the way he flew
into the sky (before he fell).  With grace.

U.S. Marine, Iwo Jima, 1945

Snapshot

It was if someone had shot a flash
off inches from my eyes.  It was white, white,
and stung my cheeks as if I had been slapped
hard in the face.  I must have lost some time,
because I woke up in a shattered house.
Then stumbling down the street, I heard the people
crying “Help,” but I could not help, and now
I passed by a stalled streetcar of dead people
and touched the yellow burns across my face
and body.  Odd.  The flesh was hanging free.
I tried to pat my skin back into place.
Some people were so charred I could not see
if they were lying face down or on their backs.
They didn’t look like human beings.  But they
were still alive. I thought, who could do that?
And then my heart filled up with bitter hate.
People lay along the rivers screaming.
The sky was read.  Hiroshima was burning.

Girl, Hiroshima, 1945

Wartime Medicine

We hated them and thought them less than human,
but they were useful wile they were not dead.
We wanted to find out just what would happen
when we dissected them alive.  Truman
had firebombed the city and we fled
and hated pilots.  They were less than human,
We wouldn’t amputate the limbs of true men,
take out their livers, and to find out what happens
when you bisect the living lungs.  We knew when
they watched us paralyzed with drugs and dread
they hated us.  Thoughtless, they ceased to be men
as their blood drained out, and their skin turned blue, and
the tin table filled up with parts turned red.
We wanted to find justice and what happens
when you cut circles in the skull, unscrew them
then poke a knife into the opened head.
We hated them.  We thought them less than human.
So we found out exactly what would happen.

Doctor, Anatomy Department, Kyushu University, 1945