Silence is always audible through the noise,

it’s your watching soul

disturbed. The buzzing city is a laminate

pressed upon awful stillness. You arrive

among a Ninja whispering of rain

under a riot of tyres at

Victoria Inn, 6-24 Dougashou.
In this lobby they’ve buried the body of the desert

in art deco

plush English furniture complete with upright

Agatha Christie phone – you’re in the Cotswolds

not Nagasaki

till in reception Japanese are bowing

as in the days of Queen Victoria,

when smuggled guns began this sad relationship

with high explosives. 
In the lift’s quietness you ascend like God, aware

of an itchy skin rash on your ankles. Hotel soaps?

Room 412, you splash on lotion, rub it in

hang your soaking socks over the towel-rack,

then step into the shoes

of invading armies back five hundred years

that burned across Japan’s most Christian city. 
Jesuit footfalls in the aisles

of this painted wooden church, modern veneer

on Armageddon. At Ground Zero you stand

before a high blackened chimney, potent as

a crucifix. 
Peace Park down the road, a shuttle-shuffle place

with photographs in tiers of floors to terrorise

the human spirit into peace while, blocks away

devotees hover in pachinko parlours

firing exploding rounds like they’re in Moscow,

New York, London – not in a nuclear graveyard.

The rain has stopped, the desert’s everywhere.
What do you do when you’re bombed back to the Stone Age?

You bury and rebuild, and learn to love

baseball. Now, in the silent lobby, waiting

for the bus, you’re thinking it could be

yesterday, or Nineteen-Fortyfive, serene,

two minutes past eleven.