Burnt and bedraggled
refugees,
Hellish Hiroshima's
escapees,
reach respite.
Nagasaki opens
its hospitable arms.
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Author Notes
The septolet is a 14 word, 7 line poem. The first verse starts a picture. The second verse completes that picture, providing a different, often ironic, perspective.
In 2006 a documentary was produced entitled Twice Survived: the Doubly Atomic Bombed of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It gives the account of those people who, having survived the August 6th bombing of Hiroshima, sought refuge in Nagasaki, a couple hundred miles away. They were then victims of Nagasaki's August 9th atomic bombing. There is no accurate count of how many made the trek from one city to the other, or how many survivors of Hiroshima were then killed in Nagasaki, but at the time of the 2006 documentary, the producers were able to locate 165 people who had survived both bombings and were still alive to tell this harrowing story. The American "nicknames" for the two bombs were Little Boy and Fat Man. Several days after this second bombing, which added many more tens of thousands of deaths to the Hiroshima death toll, Japan finally surrendered.
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