Poems of Peace: Oluwaseyi Daniel Busari, Peace from the Ashes

Peace from the Ashes

For Hiroshima, eighty years after

 

And so it was—

The sun, jealous of itself,

Split in two above Shima.

It bloomed:

A second coming of silence,

Without trumpets nor angels,

But a shrine of screaming light—

Even silence had pores to bleed from.

Children’s laughter froze mid-breath.

Bone-chimes shattered into shadow-scrolls.

Cicadas shrieked like red-lipped sirens.

Peace was not born that day.

Peace was a barefoot girl—

Ghost-skin unraveling—

Cradling her brother’s ribs

Like reed flutes

Blown by breathless gods.

She limped across the red river

Where koi turned belly-up,

Like censored verses

Scribbled in soot.

They called it Little Boy.

It spoke in the accent of an orphaned sun.

Mothers embraced dust.

Fathers swallowed fire.

Yet we define peace in palaces,

On parchment.

Peace is a ghost

Learning to dance in bone shoes,

Haunting alleyways

Where laughter forgot its echo.

O Hiroshima—

First psalm of the end.

Your ashes still sing.

Your streets still buzz

With songs the dead composed—

In a key no throat can find.

Even now,

 

The cicadas remember.

Each August,

They scream the hymn again.

Let no one say we forgot.

Let no one praise the flame as beautiful.

Let no poet twist the mushroom cloud into metaphor.

There is no metaphor.

Only melted clocks,

Eyelids turned to glass,

A grandmother’s shadow

Outliving her skin.

Yet, out of the furnace came a flute.

Out of the rubble, a rice bowl catching wind.

Out of the silence,

A girl—

Still ghost,

Still fire-kissed—

Learning to spin,

To dance,

To rise.

Peace is not the absence of war.

Peace is the ash

That bloomed

Where fire sat down to feast.