poem

by David Kirby

The Simplest Language Possible

As Mr. Tsutomo Yamaguchi steps off a streetcar in Hiroshima on the morning of August 6,

1945, he looks up into a beautiful clear sky and notices an American airplane circling overhead but makes nothing of it because it’s wartime and planes are everywhere.

Instead, as he walks through a potato field to the train station, he’s thinking how much he

misses his wife and baby son.

Then he glances up at the plane again and sees that it’s dropping two parachutes.

In Russia, a teacher who is meeting Chekhov for the first time is babbling the most

pretentious nonsense when Chekhov leans forward suddenly and says, “Tell me who is the teacher in your district who beats the children?"

The man leaps up indignantly and says, "Whom do you mean? Me? Never!" 

Chekhov says, "Don't get excited. I'm not speaking of you. But I remember reading in the

newspaper that there is someone in your district who beats the children."

When the bomb goes off over Hiroshima, it’s like a flash of magnesium, Mr. Yamaguchi

remembers, like another sun, and the fireball sucks him up again and blinds him

and throws him down into the mud of the potato field, and when he wakes, he sees a pillar of fire rising into the sky, a cloud shot through with flickering light, and he thinks, “If I stay here, I'll die."

Walking into the city he passes silent crowds of people who have been tossed in the

wind like sticks, and then he comes to the river, and the bridges are down, but the water is choked with the bodies of the dead, so he steps across as though on blocks of wood—his human raft, he’ll call it.

Yamaguchi-san spends the night in a shelter and returns to Nagasaki the next day, and

even though he is badly injured, he reports to work, and just as he is telling his boss about the Hiroshima blast, “suddenly the same white light filled the room.”

When the teacher realizes that Chekhov wants him to stop spouting high-flown

language that means nothing and simply tell the story in his own voice, he says, “It’s true. There was such a case. It was Makarov. You know, it’s not surprising. It’s cruel but explainable."

The teacher wipes his face and sits down and says, “He's married, has four children, his

wife is ill, and he himself is consumptive. His salary is 20 rubles, the school like a cellar, and the teacher has but a single room—under such circumstances you will give a thrashing to an angel of God for no fault,” and he adds, “and the children—they're far from angels, believe me."

The man who had been belaboring Chekhov with his store of clever words suddenly

finds himself speaking simply and clearly, lighting with fire the terrible truth about life in a Russian village.

Six days after the Nagasaki attack, Japan surrenders.

Mr. Yamaguchi recovers from his wounds, goes to work for the American occupation

forces and becomes a teacher, though still he sees the dead on the ground, rising and walking past him, and he begins to write poems in the simplest language possible and publishes them in a book he calls The Human Raft.

“Thinking of myself as a phoenix, / I cling on until now,” he writes, “But how painful they

have been, / those twenty-four years past,” and “All the Buddhas died, and never heard what killed them.”

Yamaguchi takes pains to use the simplest language possible so the words don’t get in

the way of his desire to shape his experience and understand it as best he can and pass on what he wants to say to us. 

In Russia, the teacher takes Chekhov’s hand in his own as he is about to say goodbye and

says, "I came to you in fear and trembling. I puffed myself out like a turkey cock. I wanted to show you that I was no ordinary mortal. And now I'm leaving you as a close friend who understands everything.”

The parachutes Yamaguchi-san saw were carrying instruments designed to measure the

intensity of the blast, and when they land five miles north of ground zero, the townspeople think the instruments themselves might be bombs, so they drown them in water.

But cloth is scarce in wartime, so they cut up the parachutes and make cushions and slip

covers, and one man remembers his mother making shirts from the chutes’ silk.

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David Kirby teaches at Florida State University. His latest books are a poetry collection, The Winter Dance Party, Poems 1983-2023, and a textbook modestly entitled The Knowledge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them. Kirby is also the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement described as “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense.” In 2016, Kirby received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Florida Humanities, which called him "a literary treasure of our state."