The Kamikaze Remembers

 

 

[Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, with its terrifying intimations of global conflict, has me remembering this old poem of mine, FWIW. First published in Whetstone 63, December, 2002. — JK.]

 

 

Of History’s blood-drinkers

We were some of the gentlest,

Shy younger sons, passed over

In the first calls; silent

At dawn in the hungry classrooms, 

Bashful in the dark streets going home. 

Not a man of my squadron who would dare

Raise his voice to his mother.

 

Japan will remember, they said,

This glory is forever.

Anyway it was the fashion,

More or less, for boys everywhere:

Russians at Stalingrad, Germans

In submarines in the lost Atlantic,

The Yankees at Midway, not so long ago,

In their decrepit planes; 

Our own in Asia all those years. 

So what was strange?

Too polite to live, we tied

Our scarves, we drank our saki,

And off we went: most to fall

Like sizzling stones in the gray

And unremembering sea; just a few

To visit the strangling ships

In such fireballs and mushroom clouds 

That hope flared darkly again

In the Planning Office. So we 

Prolonged a while the hideous mistake

And that was glory.                       

 

But nothing is forever.  Trifocalled

And gray, the last of our old classmates 

Come smiling from the golf course.

Steadied by successful lives, they

Pause, frown, shake their heads

And cannot bring our faces back.

One day the world itself will fail

In flames of the expanding sun.

And what in all the darkness then

Can repay the scent of evening in the streets,

A lover’s smile, a moment’s breath?