"Welcome to Hiroshima" Review

"Welcome to Hiroshima" Review

"Welcome to Hiroshima" by Mary Jo Salter 

Born on August 15, 1954 in Grand Rapids, local poet Mary Jo Salter is the co-editor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. She is also a professor in the Writing Seminars program at Johns Hopkins University. 

Welcome to Hiroshima

is what you first see, stepping off the train:
a billboard brought to you in living English
by Toshiba Electric. While a channel
silent in the TV of the brain

projects those flickering re-runs of a cloud
that brims its risen columnful like beer
and, spilling over, hangs its foamy head,
you feel a thirst for history: what year

it started to be safe to breathe the air,
and when to drink the blood and scum afloat
on the Ohta River. But no, the water’s clear,
they pour it for your morning cup of tea

in one of the countless sunny coffee shops
whose plastic dioramas advertise
mutations of cuisine behind the glass:
a pancake sandwich; a pizza someone tops

with a maraschino cherry. Passing by
the Peace Park’s floral hypocenter (where
how bravely, or with what mistaken cheer,
humanity erased its own erasure),

you enter the memorial museum
and through more glass are served, as on a dish
of blistered grass, three mannequins. Like gloves
a mother clips to coatsleeves, strings of flesh

hang from their fingertips; or as if tied
to recall a duty for us, Reverence
the dead whose mourners too shall soon be dead,
but all commemoration’s swallowed up

in questions of bad taste, how re-created
horror mocks the grim original,
and thinking at last They should have left it all
you stop. This is the wristwatch of a child.

Jammed on the moment’s impact, resolute
to communicate some message, although mute,
it gestures with its hands at eight-fifteen
and eight-fifteen and eight-fifteen again

while tables of statistics on the wall
update the news by calling on a roll
of tape, death gummed on death, and in the case
adjacent, an exhibit under glass

is glass itself: a shard the bomb slammed in
a woman’s arm at eight-fifteen, but some
three decades on—as if to make it plain
hope’s only as renewable as pain,

and as if all the unsung
debasements of the past may one day come
rising to the surface once again—
worked its filthy way out like a tongue. 

Published only 39 years after the detonation of the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, the ultimate tone of the open-verse poem "Welcome to Hiroshima" is that of gloom, as the poem focuses on human destruction. Salter presents imagery of the lingering effects of war, or rather the lack of them. She presents a verbal "split-screen" and juxtaposes contemporary Hiroshima with it's former 1945 model by comparing the decimation of the city during and shortly after the detonation, and the commercial appeal of the city today. Salter begins the poem through the eyes of a tourist on holiday to a foreign country. Knowledgeable of the city's past, the tourist is not expecting to see what she sees. Her first sight and reaction of the city is similar to that of someone who has just entered Times Square in downtown New York City for the first time. She is consumed by the awesomeness of the city's modernization, such as it's Toshiba billboard, it's coffee shops, and it's variations of fusion cuisines. While seeing this, she projects the visceral images of the city's past into her mind, the suffering that occurred in the city haunts her every sight. Phrases such as "mutations of cuisine" and "blistered grass" allude to the mutations and destruction caused by the bombs radiation. Despite the fact that she as a tourist sees these images, the local population seems oblivious the devastation of the past. She makes the comparison between the city and a flowers reproduction and determines that Hiroshima has experienced a "double erasure". The first one being the bomb itself,the second being the people who have chosen to forget.