The Arts
&
Social Justice / Social Issues
WAR CHILDREN
Afghani Children Play With Found Weapons/Gernades Which Are Active - see explosion
© Grace Wiebe, EthniClay, 2006
Modelling Clay Figurines and Blank Note Cards re War/War Children, etc.
African Youth Ministries - also reaching out to war orphans, etc. - note cards and T-shirts to purchase, etc.
'Iraqi Children' Note Cards
Landmines - War's Lethal Legacy
NO FREEDOM - a video about war-affected children
TAKE ARMS - a song of awareness for War Children
War Child Artists and ideas
Stalin - Duncan Long's 'Stalin' short movie online
Says Duncan Long - "Just a note to let you know that
you can view my new short movie
"Stalin"
(which combines my artwork with animation and other odds and
ends along with my music) here
===
Poem: by Mitsuyoshi Toge: 'How Could I
Ever Forget That Flash'
From: 'How Could I Ever Forget That Flash' - SojoMail 08.02.07
"Mitsuyoshi Toge, born in Hiroshima in 1917, was a Catholic and a poet.
He was in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped on the city on August
6, 1945, when he was 24 years old. Toge died at age 36. His firsthand experience
of the bomb, his passion for peace, and his realistic insight into the event
made him a leading poet in Hiroshima. This poem is from Hiroshima-Nagasaki:
A Pictorial Record of the Atomic Destruction (1978).
How could I ever forget that flash of light!
In a moment, thirty thousand people ceased to be,
The cries of fifty thousand killed
At the bottom of crushing darkness;
Through yellow smoke whirling into light,
Buildings split, bridges collapsed,
Crowded trams burnt as they rolled about
Hiroshima, all full of boundless heaps of embers.
Soon after, skin dangling like rags;
With hands on breasts;
Treading upon the broken brains;
Wearing shreds of burn cloth round their loins;
There came numberless lines of the naked,
all crying.
Bodies on the parade ground, scattered like
jumbled stone images of Jizo;
Crowds in piles by the river banks,
loaded upon rafts fastened to the shore,
Turned by and by into corpses
under the scorching sun;
in the midst of flame
tossing against the evening sky,
Round about the street where mother and
brother were trapped alive under the fallen house
The fire-flood shifted on.
On beds of filth along the Armory floor,
Heaps, and God knew who they were?
Heaps of schoolgirls lying in refuse
Pot-bellied, one-eyed, with half their skin peeled
off bald.
The sun shone, and nothing moved
But the buzzing flies in the metal basins
Reeking with stagnant ordure.
How can I forget that stillness
Prevailing over the city of three hundred thousands?
Amidst that calm,
How can I forget the entreaties
Of departed wife and child
Through their orbs of eyes,
Cutting through our minds and souls?
For Hiroshima-Nagasaki memorial service resources, please go to Faithful Security
(National Religious Partnership on the Nuclear Weapons Danger)"