Nagasaki Blossoms

Here’s the first poem from my index card boxes for poems that start with the letter N:

Nagasaki blossoms—

the old man folds a crane

with his eyes closed

Do you know the story of Sadako Sasaki? She was two years old when she was a victim of the atomic bomb that fell on Hiroshima. At the age of 11 she was diagnosed with leukemia, a direct result of fallout radiation, and she died later that same year, 1955, at the age of 12. Before she died, however, she set herself the goal of folding a thousand paper cranes, believing that achieving that number would grant her a wish. She folded a thousand and then continued with 300 more before she died (some people believe, apparently incorrectly, that she never reached her goal of folding a thousand). Her story and her wish for world peace has become the subject of songs, poems, and children’s books. In 1958, according to her Wikipedia page, “a statue of Sasaki holding a golden crane was unveiled in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park.” Another statue was installed in 1990 at the Peace Park in Seattle, but was stolen, except for the feet, in 2024. Every year thousands of children and adults around the world make origami cranes in support of Sadako’s wish.

My poem is about Nagasaki, but Sadako’s wish applies there equally as much. I wrote my haiku on 26 April 2015, in Seattle. I sent it out for publication in 2022 to Tinywords and Petrichor, but it wasn’t published until 2023, in Hedgerow, in England. My sense is that the old man folding cranes in my poem had done it so frequently, in support of world peace, that, even with all the intricacies of origami, he could do so with his eyes closed. Perhaps he is also closing his eyes against the horrors of war. And surely Sadako Sasaki was an inspiration to him, as she has been to so many others. One would have had to have folded many cranes to be able to do so with eyes closed, and perhaps he had been folding cranes all his life. Does this suggest the futility of the wish? I hope, instead, it suggests an unflagging resolve, a dogged desire to promote peace, for which the folding of cranes is an ongoing symbol. These origami cranes are an emblem of hope, as are the brightly coloured blossoms that return each year to Nagasaki.

As an aside, here’s a poem I wrote on 21 March 2012, remembering the 11 March 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami:

tsunami anniversary—

a thousand cranes

still to be folded

—23 May 2025 (previously unpublished)