Today's poem is by Paola R. Bruni

Miracle at Hiroshima
                        Eight blocks from the bomb's detonation,
                        a two-story Catholic Presbytery remained intact,
                        its eight Jesuit priests unscathed.

Say he eats a grapefruit, flays thick rind,
exposes translucent membrane,
pink flesh startling and sour.

Say his body rises suddenly weightless
in the limbs of a leviathan gust,
glass pinging his skin like hail. Say his lungs
labor under the unexpected crush.
What airless benediction?
Even the sun brought to her knees.

He listens for sounds that do not come,
song of Mallard and Merganser,
Cackling Goose, children wrapped in skeins
of laughter. Even the harbor gone
to silent matter.

Say his faith is a feather falling.
Say his eyes open to the unsayable,
a rough-hewn rendering, artist's erasure,
oily white shadows, bodies less than ash,
free-floating mass of once was.

He kneels in contrition, bends his spine
uttering a lyric, psalm, a tremulous Hail Mary!

Say a footfall, nearly diaphanous,
a woman's delicate arch on his back.
Then a child's slight refrain, heavy tread
of a builder—all marching single
file over each vertebral gate.

Say he was made for this—shepherding
the dead into the afterworld—numbering
each untethered soul; banker in his bowler hat,
girl and her kite, the fishmonger who'd hawked
startle-eyed trout from wooden crates
at the shore.

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Copyright © 2024 Paola R. Bruni All rights reserved
from Five Points
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission