Images
Shadows on a wall,
Silhouettes,
Vaporised people.
Melted faces,
Crisped carapaces,
Cooked meat.
Staggering forward,
Tranquilised fog,
Flayed skin trailing.
Charred,
Smoking,
Rubble,
Vacuous,
Gaping,
Emptiness,
Hiroshima,
Nagasaki,
Moscow,
London
And New York.
Opher – 20.11.2024
As Putin once again threatens the world with another nuclear holocaust, my mind goes back to previous horrors.
I have certain images indelibly printed on my mind. I read accounts of what happened in Hiroshima.
There were shadows, silhouettes of a family, on a wall. They were instantly vaporised by the heat, burning their shadows onto the wall. That was all that was left.
I saw the photos of survivors with the most horrendous burns. They had been a little further out from ground zero. All exposed skin had melted. Their faces were a plastic sheet, burnt, flesh melted into a formless mass. Fingers on hands fused into shapeless blobs. How people survived was beyond belief.
I saw pictures of people whose backs had burnt into a charcoaled crust resembling the carapace of a beetle.
Flesh was cooked.
An eye witness recounted seeing helplessly dazed people staggering out of the city in a narcotised hazy with their skin trailing behind them in the dust.
The city had gone. All that was left was smoking rubble and huge empty spaces. The odd building, miraculously intact, scattered here and there.
And once again we have war; a war based on fear and power.
Are we going to repeat this outrageous madness?
