The Aioi Bridge

It was my gruffy-voiced History teacher—

Caught in the moment of inscrutable academic flair—

Who concluded his lesson of World War II

By stating that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Ended the war.

He said they were atomic bombs.

Said the U.S. sent a bomb to Hiroshima

Boom!

Then sent a bomb to Nagasaki

Boom!

And more than 150,000 people DIED!

Just like that.

Poof! Gone!

Just like that.

And my History teacher,  in a stance of disinterested bystander

Said these things.

Said them like it was some idle talk on way to the market place.

May be it was the hot afternoon that numbed his senses.

May be it was because of his repeated teachings

That made his shock blunt.

May be....May be...

What my History teacher never knew

Was that that day, I went to our school dormitory

And properly mourned such a calamity.

I thought it was proper to whisper into the darkness

To all those 150,000 plus people and say,

“O Departed Souls, what madness drove me, a fellow human,

To kill you in so cruel a way?

What shall I tell my heart now that I have cruelly killed

By burning the fresh buds that sprouted?”

And I wept into the night

And when a friend overheard me,

Concerned, he asked

To which, in-between sobs

I said that I was mourning Hiroshima and Nagasaki

To which my friend responded,

“That is History! That is the past. You are being over-sensitive!”

I felt offended.

I felt offended because he thought I was not being normal.

I wept more.

My History teacher probably never saw the picture of Hiroshima before 6th August 1945

When it was bombed.

For if he did, I would have felt the tear in his voice.

O! Hiroshima was so full of life; it went about her business;

Like elands on the savannah, Hiroshima enchanted.

See Hiroshima! See Hiroshima in her full spleandour!

See her peoples! More than 90,000 alive, just breathing!

Now see Hiroshima! See the billow of smoke! See the pandemonium!

See the cloud of destruction! See death now! See the 90,000 cindered!

See the eland as small ash, not even the horns spared.

Of course that is history. It is the past, you know.

After I had mourned Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

On the next day, I drew a picture of an eland by the Aioi Bridge

I thought that it was befitting tribute to the departed souls

Because the eland in her beauty would always remind us

Of the beauty of our souls.

The Aioi Bridge is our bridge to everlasting peace.

I hang this picture on my bed to remind myself

To look at the Aioi Bridge.

It is the bridge to find me, to find my peace.


C) Salem Lorot/ echoesofthehills 2014

In response to a prompt by Poet's United 

Midweek Motif ~ Hiroshimaor Ring a Bell

SATAO

Before you read this poem, kindly read the story below on the death of Satao. I am griefing!

The Story on the Death of Satao



Deeply grieved, my heart bleeds;
Moved, shocked, tears well my eyes
I imagine how you met your death--
They came, and with cruelty in their breasts
They felled you, Satao.
All for a price of tusks? All for the price of ivory? Of trinkets?
Had they stopped for a moment and be held in awe of your majesty
Had they watched, even briefly, your spleandour
Had they had forewarning of our broken hearts
May be they might have spared you, Satao.
But those heartless men, lacking in finesse,
Savagely killed you.
Sometimes I wonder to myself
What I will tell my children, many years from now,
All elephants gone. Killed. Killed. *Tears*
With your cool spirit, Satao, did you have to die this cruelly?
All for a price of tusks? All for the price of ivory?
Can they place a price tag of your worth?
Can they measure the size of the savannah and tell me how much
A footprint of an elephant costs? Can they?
Can they construct a sunset with an elephant in an ecosystem? Can they?
What tomfoolery! What effrontery I countenance!
Man, go kill your lot, leave the animal kingdom alone?
Go kill yourselves, rob your lot's teeth, steal their hair
But I say, leave our animals alone!
Leave our animals alone, you damned creature!
Go gallop to your ruination, you heartless pavements!
Go to your industries and manufacture your dummy ivories
Go kill your lot, go thieving elsewhere, go shedding blood elsewhere
We mourn Satao,
He never started fights, he never picked quarrel with anyone
He concerned himself with his business at Tsavo
He never stole somebody's land
He never slept with anyone's wife
He broke no law
He was kind to strangers who pried on his privacy
Yet Satao was killed. Gruesomely killed.
They say that when poachers pounced on him
Brandishing pangas and blunt weapons
They say Satao let out one final cry
A muffled cry of wild consternation
Something like, 'Spare my life, what wrong
Have I done to face death this cruel!'
Satao, O the most humble Satao,
Pleaded with them, his tusks spread out in supplication,
Told them, 'Friends, what wrong have I done? I can correct my ways
If to perdition you are keen to send me to'
Satao's body was bestraddled on the ground
In earnest plea for mercy.
Satao cried and cried and cried.
"Spare me! Spare me, brothers!"
Not even the hoarse beseeching softened their hearts.
In total surrender, with tusks in supplication,
Arms raised the pangas and when they descended
To Satao's tusks they fell...
Chop! Chop! Chop!
Like a civilian in total surrender, Satao hoped,
Having an inkling of the fairness of man in warfare,
Yet no rules of war fairness did Satao get
Chop! Chop! Chop!
Hear Satao gasping for breath, his blood flowing on the savannah
See Satao, see him now, See his legs kicking,
See Satao now, his eyes pained by the betrayal
See Satao, see his energy ooze away, see his essence leaving,
See Satao's tail lifting up in the air in such pain...
See Satao's padded feet pressing against the savannah
Feel Satao's heart now, feel his broken heart, feel his sadness
Hear Satao breathing out his last.. hear his last cry pierce the savannah
They say that that day Satao died
Baby elephants came at night and held a vigil
That night, as Poor Satao's face lay defaced,
They say a small rush of wind circled around him
Singing an elegy to him.
That night, there was silence in the savannah
Satao lay dead.
That morning he had met with his fellow friends
And had planned to meet at their favourite watering hole
But here, in a cold night in Tsavo,
Satao lay dead
Animals wondered what lofty hatred and revenge
Was exacted on Satao
But of what benefit were answers to these questions?
Satao was no more.
Friendly and majestic Satao lay dead.
Not far away from his home (because he preferred keeping his space)
You might not believe this, Satao was killed
At his home, far away from vehicles, far away from thugs, far away
From disease and poverty.
Killed, not by his own, but by aliens!
Such is death! Such mystery!
~Poem by Salem Lorot
‪#‎Satao‬ ‪#‎KWS‬ ‪#‎SaveOurElephants‬ ‪#‎Tsavo‬

Meditations of a Father

 Son, when I admonished you to curve a path for yourself

To create wonderful vistas of a world unexplored—

Beautiful, magnificent—

Was my voice harsh?

When I urged you to grow up to be a man of great learning

Learned in poetry, science, law, theology, philosophy, geology

Did I intimidate you, son?

Did you not grab the earnestness of my plea?

Son,  when I walk around and see you dull

Caged by the stifling thoughts of here and now

Do you think me happy

When I know that your mind can soar the skies

Wrestling with the ideas of man and the earth?

Am I too harsh to you, Son,

When in my unguarded moments of anger

I tell you that your dreams are too great

To be traded with the present sorrows and want?

When I lead you into the night

And point to you the majesty of the skies

Do you mistake me for a senile old man?

When I show you which stars shine brightest

Prodding you to take those stars to your sleep

Do I test your patience, son?

When I wake you up at dawn

So that we can watch the sunrise

Do you see me as a mean father?

Do you doubt  my sanity when I weep

Just by witnessing the birth of a new day?

Son, when I speak a lot about the flowers,

The stars, the moon, the oceans, the butterflies,

The rocky mountains, the sand dunes

Do you sometimes secretly wish

I would just stop and talk ‘normally’?

Son, am I harsh, when I let you in into the greatest secrets of the universe?

Do I bore you, Son?

Of Love

Tell me, O Plato, what I should conceive of this,

Bidden as I was to a fluttering feeling ( flattering, perhaps?) that I once felt

Which enslaved, rather than ennobled,

How would I have been lost in the beauty of love

( In the same way as you, while with Aristodemus)?

How, in this encomium of love,

Unlike Orpheus ( bidden to cross Hades alive),

Will I be ready to die for love?

Or like virtuous Alcestis, die at the behest of love?

Wouldn't I, like Achilles who avenged for Patroclus,

in my small turf of love, be the flute-player,

Of love redefined, honourable and virtuous?

Teach me, then, O Plato,

to live the truth that love is the love of the

everlasting possession of the good.

Wouldn't I want to seek immortality

To leave behind glorious tales

Of love, pure and true,

in the breasts of men,

Least to the awe of nature?

C) Salem Lorot /echoes of the hills 2014

Note:

This poem has been influenced by Plato's 'Symposium'. 

I found a very nice quote on love:

"Love is said to be the god who

Gives peace on earth and calms the stormy deep,

Who stills the winds and bids  the sufferer sleep"

Little Things to Make This World a Better Place

Gandhi. Photo credit: Google.

Pilgrim, the Higher Truth has thus be revealed to me

in a most profound way. I sat reading Gandhi’s Autobiography 

'The Story of My Experiments with Truth'

and inside the covers, I picked one important legacy he left for the world:

Service.

This world, Pilgrim, cries out for service.

Men and women who can do something for others—

not for money’s sake, not for fame’s sake,

but for the fulfillment of their mission on this Earth.

All around me I see these gallant men and women.

You might not find them on billboards and monuments

You see them everyday, some helping an old man

Crossing the road, some helping out an illiterate read a letter.

And when we are long gone, Pilgrim,

It will not matter what we accumulated in our sojourn here

But the little things we did to make this world a better place.

Note:

I have finished reading Mahatma’s Gandhi Autobiography titled ‘The Story of My Experiments with Truth’.  I hesitate to comment much on the book as I need time to digest what Gandhi’s life means to me. Of course, Gandhi is well known for the ‘Satyagraha’ and as satyagrahi ( or would-be’s), we have important lessons to pick there.

Allow me to say this. I have admired a great deal Gandhi’s service to humanity. He eschewed self aggrandizement. He strove for the others. As an advocate, I admired his truthfulness in his legal career, albeit intermittently. If a client was untrue to him, he would not take up the case. I also remember him pointing out an error to the court, which had the potential harm of them losing the case. This, despite the fact that his Senior in the case thought otherwise.

On humility, Gandhi would travel Third Class in trains and experience what those passengers went through ( Until later, much to his regret, when his health failed him and thus could not). Of course there are numerous other examples from his life. But today, it appears that humility is equated to weakness. Pomp, braggadocio, chest-thumping are seen as important ingredients for upward mobility. I have always remembered, much to my consternation, my clients telling me “you are so soft”, the other party needs somebody who will shout and create so much noise and intimidation. Unfortunately, I have never been this person. I always want to state my position and my convictions calmly and deliberately. Fanfare is not for me.

I intend to experiment on some of Gandhi’s experiments. As for now, I would not want to comment further. But there are important lessons I have drawn from the book.

Council of Sages

When I have soaked the endless conversations

Just about any blabber adults will churn out

Accusations and counter-accusations,

Truths, half-truths and outright lies

Words which heal not

Words, like javelin thrown,

Aimed to create heroes and zeroes

When I am drenched in the ramblings

The whys and wherefores

The thou-art-the-problem and thou-art-the-devil

When I have immersed myself in all this

I retreat to my safe haven, a quiet corner,

Get myself a nice book and read

And soon, I am thrust into a different world

The sorrow that sunk me a moment earlier

Is all but a distant, tiny wisp

Around me now, is my “Council of Sages”

With them, I am holding a serious conversation.

My Memory Palace

I will build myself my memory palace
Where, in their loci, I will store all I want to remember.

I would want to store facts, like the savants,
Churn out facts, gobble every other factoids there is.

I would know my memory palace well,
Have an image of where I placed my wristband
On a sloppy Saturday midnight.

And I will not write anything.
I will not keep any notebook or diary.

If you were to ask me, perchance,
The fourth line of Shakespeare's Macbeth,
I will never falter
And if you were to ask me to memorise 100,000 digits back and forth
I will.

I am tired of my forgetfulness
( I forget whether tomorrow is going to be your birthday)
And it hurts, and it costs me

All that I want to build for myself, right now
is a memory palace.
To memorize the Black's Law Dictionary ( just for the heck of it)
And see my mental gymnastics do the trick

I want to claim back my memory
And throw away these extensions to my memory
Like the Greek Orators, I want to speak from within me
To retain in as much as I read

C) Salem Lorot 2013/ echoesofthehills

****
I am reading a book titled 'Moonwalking with Einstein', a book on the art of remembering by Joshua Foer. It is an exciting book that I bought off the streets on one lazy Saturday afternoon. Quite some read.

Echoes of the Hills, Where Thou Art?

I think a quick update on what I have been up to will do. You see, when you have been absent from the blogosphere from 4th of July of this year still now, I owe it to my readers to "show cause why" I have been that scarce.

Largely, I have been preoccupied with the demands of my day job as a legal practitioner dealing with Children matters in the courts. Most of the times I have carried work home to finish them there and I really miss the days when I used to churn out one poem every day.

But, even amidst all this, I am very guilty. Guilty for not writing. Guilty for not penning my poems. And there has always been something hitting me every other time. Something odd. And there has been a vacuum within me. My spirit has been restless and I am glad that I can write this.

Let me see if I will write a poem after this.

I am back, my fans.

Sincerely,
echoesofthehills