Wow! Still carries the same message, the same weight, the same punch in the gut.

As if we hadn’t seen enough
steaming up and down the Tonkin Gulf,
we took the train to Nagasaki,
while the ship was held up in dry dock,

stood beneath the epicenter
of the Thin Man some say
ended World War Two,

visited the war museum,
plastic replicas of melted bodies,
human shadows burnt into walls,
an aerial photograph of the city
pressed flat as a chrysanthemum.

And the Peace Statue,
pointing its long bronze finger
at everyone but us,
where we hesitated
and took photographs,
wondering what that hunk of metal
would look like in Vietnam.

Tina