Poets for Peace

Poets for Peace

Each time a poet

Puts pen to paper,

There is a sliver of hope

For Peace.

 

I was privileged to read some of my war and peace poems at the annual Poets for Peace event for Peace Action in downtown,  Sacramento last night. Here are excerpts from my readings, focusing on our children for they often seem to have a clearer understanding of our quest for the intangible, than adults.

 

FromCharles Pellegrino’s Last Train from Hiroshima with my own notations:

 

Masahiro Sasaki: brother of Sadako and the Thousand Cranes, and a survivor of Hiroshima, gave a lecture in Vienna.

 

A little boy about eleven, asked him: Mr. Sasaki, who dropped the atomic bomb?

 

Mr. Sasaki answered:

 

 It’sbeen more than 60 years since the bombs were dropped. God made everyone equal. So, I forgot who dropped the bomb.

The boy nodded understanding, and gave Mr. Sasaki a thumbs-up.

 

To the adults: It does not matter who dropped the bomb. It’s not an issue. It should never be an issue for any country. It’s an issue for all humanity. If the feeling of Omoiyari…think about the other person first…can be taken to heart and passed down by just a few of you in this room today, it may, in time lessen the dangers in the world. This is my wish: We pass this simple philosophy of Omoiyari to the next generation.

 

Mr. Sasaki looked at the boy who asked the question and said: Children, teach your parents.

 

The following is lifted from my collection of  short stories that will be published this Fall.

In this scene, Sonny and I, both 12, are on our backs, looking up at the sky.

 

 “Eh Sonny,” I said, lying on my back, looking up into the sky, “Did you see Charlie Chaplin last night?”

“No, I’m goin’ this Saturday to see The Lone Ranger.”

“Charlie Chaplin was funny. He was so hungry, he boiled his shoes to make soup. He ate his shoe lace like spaghetti.  They keep showing the same war  news.”

I watched the clouds, white chiffon gowns of the wind, swaying against the clear blue sky, wedding gowns, lacy veils and silk trains, flowing and moving like brides down the aisles.  An ache of unknown source filled me to the brim. Sonny saw faces of fat Churchill and the Lone Ranger.

“Eh Sonny, I bet if Truman and Stalin got on their backs like this and looked at the clouds and the skies, they would think of peace, not war.”

“Yeah, this is better than sitting around a  table, that’s for sure. Hard to make war when you look up to  the sky.”

“Yeah, a Peace Conference outside in the fields or out at the beach. All the leaders on their backs like this, looking up at the clouds and feeling the wind on their faces. For sure, they wouldn’t make war.”

“And they shouldn’t wear shoes.”

“Yeah, and they better not have toe jam.” We lay there, laughing, wriggling our toes in the air, far removed from the war news on screen.

It became obvious as the years went by, that no one heard Sonny’s and my idea of  the “Open Air Peace Conference.” War clouds with different names continued to float past us throughout the years. 

 

My life’s passages are identified by wars for we are still fighting the first war under different names and it’s time for a change.

 

 

When Will I Know Peace?

 

When will I know Peace?

“She is at Peace,” they told me

When my mother died.

Is that the only way I will know Peace?

When I die?  and you will say,

She is at Peace?

 

NO! I want Peace now.

I want to see it on children’s faces

All over the world.

I want to taste it, lick it, swallow it

Like chocolate ice-cream in August.

I want to hear it, I want to hear it.,.what is the sound of Peace?

I want to bathe in it, feel it wrap around me

Like skin. I don’t want  it after I’m stiff and dead.

I want Peace now.

           

 

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Conversations Between Charles Pellegrino and Frances

Our Conversations on Last Train from Hiroshima

This is an update on the status of Charles Pellegrino’s book,  Last Train from Hiroshima. We both decided to share our latest emails to keep you abreast of what’s going on over the controversy that arose after the book was released. Mr. Pellegrino is revising the original for publication.

From: Charles Pellegrino: ( He wrote this email to Mr. Henry Alter after reading my book Mosaic Moon.)

Dear Henry:

Naturally, I’ve been very busy with radiation-deniers from the 509th, the Air Force, my publisher and the N.Y. Times being fooled by someone pretending to be a Los Alamos physicist, New Zealanders reaching out to help me (like Dr. Ken Goldie, who was there when all the trouble began) and revelations that the ad hoc tribunals of the 1980s were more extensive and secretive than anyone imagined.

But I haven’t forgotten you and Orion.

In fact, I’ve been reminded of all of you in elder care advocacy by having finally taken an afternoon to have a few cups of tea and read some poetry.

Which brings me to a book of poems that is hard to describe but which is helpful to anyone who has dealt with or is dealing with a friend or family member living with Alzheimers, late stage Parkinsons, etc.  It’s called “Mosaic Moon: Caregiving Through Poetry, by Frances Kakugawa, Watermark Publishing, Hawaii (now in its second printing). I’ve CCd the author. You may want to get in contact.

Charlie P.

Frances: Thanks for pointing me to page 91. I haven’t had a chance to finish – but on every page I turned to, I found beauty. (That is not my usual experience with books of poetry).

My response:

Wow, this means a lot.

I’m on my third poetry writing support group for caregivers in Sacramento now and we’re still walking out with beautiful poems. The caregivers are getting younger and younger.

Back to your work, I’m feeling good that you’re not going to succumb to all that pressure from the 509th. I’ve been thinking about their threat of having a book burning event when your revised book is out and I thought one couldn’t ask for a better promotional event, don’t you think?  Book burning in the 21^st century will have its consequences.  Truth will prevail.

Thank you so much, Dr. Charlie.

frances

from Charles Pellegrino:

Dear Frances:

I think exactly the same thing about the threat of book burning. Steve Rubin (at Holt) shuddered at the thought of “his” book being burned and shown on U-Tube and he insisted that we had to get the 509th “on our side”… and “make this all go away – quickly.” My response was that he should be thinking of getting more cameras to cover the burning, if anyone in the 509th was extremist enough and foolish enough to go through with a book-burning.

Rubin thought I was nuts.

My agent told him he was nuts, if he thought he could get the 509th on our side because “Last Train” was an anti-war book and the people who dropped the atomic bombs would never be on our side.

Then a blogger punked the publisher with a new spin on a very old story about the New Zealand Ad Hoc Tribunals (an event during which Christian Fundamentalists [in the U.S.] actually did burn the book that was causing all my trouble in New Zealand – “Darwin’s Universe”). The publisher has since looked at the documentation I sent RE my Ph.D. and my ad hoc tribunal experience (including my Ph.D. Dissertation, published in a peer-reviewed science journal; including letters proving that my two labs had indeed been ransacked and that one of the fanatical vandals sat on a self-named “ad-hoc” tribunal against which the protagonist [yours truly] was denied the most basic human right of refuting the charges or even being allowed to know what the charges were in the first place) – to say nothing of the scientists who came to my defense against the ad hoc tribunals (some of whom appear under the “Testimonials” Section on my website).

On Amazon and elsewhere, Holt withdrew its claim about the “phony” Ph.D. They also relented on the story of the two priests (who could be cross-referenced in at least two of my prior books).

About a day later, a revised Holt message appeared on Amazon suggesting that there may be other people (besides the two priests) about whom I was unable to answer questions for Holt management. This is true only to the extent that I then had no relationship with Holt (it took almost all of three months for my agent to get a reversion of rights so that a new American edition can at last be published); and I could answer no further questions because they never asked me anything further. (By the way, my editor at Holt, Jack Macrae, has stood by me this whole time. They’re not all evil over there. Jack is one of the best editors I’ve ever had.)

The 509th probably will not like the new edition. Far from diminishing Charles Sweeney I have written more about him (no matter what the Tibbets camp says, I for one came to admire Sweeney); and I have introduced another that some among the 509th dislike: Robert Lewis (known for the line, “My God, What have we done?”). Robert Lewis and Norman Cousins had befriended one of the survivors who will be appearing in the new edition.

The crazy time is not over. I’ve recently received a letter from the publisher RE a complaint from a reader suggesting that double survivor Tsutomu Yamaguchi was fictionalized, that there was no last train from Hiroshima to Nagasaki (actually, I wrote about two trains); and that the priest who died in Auschwitz in another man’s place (Mr. Yamaguchi’s hero) was also a fiction. I do not understand this emerging pattern of declaring the priests in this story as fictional. I’m counting three, so far. It’s as much a mystery as the dichotomy between Japanese survivors who hid themselves and tried not to let it be known that they had survived the atomic bomb (poor Kenshi Hirata has recently described his surviving both bombs as the great shame in his life), while enough Americans are now known to be falsely trying to claim glory by saying they were aboard the atomic missions that, in the words of one 509th veteran, the planes would never have gotten off the ground if these impostors were all really there.

- – Charlie P.

Stay tuned…as our conversations continue.

frances

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Letter of confirmation on Last Train from Hiroshima

Letter from brother of Sadako of the  thousand paper cranes

The following letter was sent to Charles Pellegrino by Mr. Sasaki, brother of the little girl memorialized in the l977 young adults book, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes by Eleanor Coerr and by author Pellegrino in The Last Train from Hiroshima. I’m sure we were not the only ones who  folded origami paper cranes for Sadako when we first read her story in our classrooms. Mr. Sasaki’s letter is printed here with permission from Charles Pellegrino.

March 1, 2010

Dear Charles Pellegrino,

I hope this note finds you in good health.  I remember your visit to my rural town, outside of Fukuoka City in Kyushu, Japan on July 18, 2008 and your thorough, detailed questions about my sister Sadako, down to the type of kimono she was wearing. I knew your questions did not arise out of mere curiosity.  You conducted the interview without revealing the fact that you were a well known, best selling book author. You were the only (first) one from overseas who came all the way from the U.S for an interview.

I shared a story with you about a boy who asked me a question after I gave a talk in Vienna in Austria in 2004. His question was “which country dropped the bomb?”  My response to the boy was “the name of the country no longer remains in my memory – it has been 60 years since the bomb was dropped and I believe God helped me erase all sorts of feelings that harbored and stood between us through all of these years.” The most important thing is to spread the heart of Omoiyari (Compassion towards others) among children and for their bright futures.

I had never told this story to visitors from overseas before I met you.  Not only did you listen to this story but also wrote about it.  Your sincerity deeply impressed and touched me and my family.  I’ve come to entrust to you with my hope that you will write about Sadako and possibly help turn her story into a film.

I am also aware that you paid a visit to comfort Mr. Yamaguchi on his deathbed, an A-bomb survivor who survived the 2 bombings dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Your visit and caring for a survivor really touched the hearts of many people.

I would like to express my gratitude to you because I was touched by our meeting in 2008 and to extend my sincere consolation to you during these trying times.  It is my sincere hope that you will be able to resume your writing as soon as possible.

I would like to conclude my note with a message to your three children, which is this – I want them to be proud that they have a great father! I have my trust in you, your strength and resilience, no matter how rough the situations you face.

JMasahiro Sasaki, Sadako’s brother.

Translated by Kazuko M.

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The Last Train From Hiroshima by Charles Pellegrino

In 1945, I heard my parents discuss the death of their families in Hiroshima. A child, I didn’t know the significance of that day, a day that my ancestors were all destroyed.
I later wrote:

Hiroshima

We cut the chrysanthemum
Off its stalk
And left it naked in the sun.
(from The Enemy Wore My Face,not yet published)

In 1989, Noriyo, a third grader from Hiroshima entered my classroom. Her grandmother, who was child during the bombing, was now dying from cancer. Her entire family moved to Hawaii on their  doctor’s recommendation: Go to Hawaii where it’s warm and sunny for the remaining year of her life.”  I wrote a poem for Noriyo:

44 Years Later

a dark mushroom cloud
follows me across the Pacific
into my classroom.

forgive us, Noriyo
for Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.
( from The Enemy Wore My Face, not yet published)

In 1995, Dr. Jiro Nakano edited and translated 100 tanka poems written by survivors (hibakusha) of Hiroshima in a book called Outcry From the Inferno. I was deeply honored to be one of the English editors.

In 2010, I read Charles Pellegrino’s The Last Train from Hiroshima.
Nothing, not the discussions in our kitchen, my poems, the editing I did to Outcry From the Inferno, nothing is more real than this book. A tanka by  Dr. Nagai, one of the survivors in Pellegrino’s book, is included in the Inferno book. One of the survivors bears the same name of my mother’s family. Mr. Pellegrino, thank you for the open wounds that will never be healed nor forgotten.

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