A nonet is a nine line poem with syllables of 9/8/7/6/5/4/3/2/1.

I do not intend this as a piece about whether or not the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified. There are those who argue that without them the war would have dragged on and resulted in even more deaths. That debate is not at issue here.

Everyone, I believe, can agree that for the 140,000 people, most civilians, who died in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and the months that followed, and for the 80,000 who died in Nagasaki on August 9 and the months following, these were horrific times for the dead, the dying and the survivors.
Of the half who died immediately, some evaporated, some were charred beyond recognition, and some had their eyeballs and internal organs explode from their bodies. Shattered glass impaled the dead and dying. Some of the dying watched their skin melt off, and radiation sickness ate away at those not in the blast's epicenter.

No mother cares about politics or history or the greater good when this surrounds her children. The people of Nagasaki had no way of knowing they would be the next target. Had there not been cloud cover over the city of Kokura on August 9, the bomb would have been discharged there and spared them. A last minute break in the clouds over their city doomed them, including an unknown number of refugees from Hiroshima who had made their way in the past couple of days to Nagasaki to find shelter there.

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