The child Sadako, the story goes,
leukemia victim of Hiroshima,
folded some 600 paper cranes
hoping for health, for peace, in the year
before she died.
Her friends completed the thousand cranes
to lift Sadako's bomb-caused doom,
bear off the poisons on crane-wings,
the poisons of war. My friends, we weep
imagining small, hopeful fingers,
children folding cranes of hope
that madness might be carried away,
crane-forming children with their wish
to heal Sadako, to heal us all.
We say that tears accomplish nothing,
that all they do is sting with salt,
and yet such tears can makes a start.
The children raised a monument
to Sadako, bomb-sickened child of war.
Her image there holds a golden crane
in triumph over mindless death.
And now in our time of bombings and death,
the unending news of mindless horror,
vast pain that so-called "patriots" will,
destroying, sickening enemies,
we weep for us, we weep for them,
until that "them" becomes an "us,"
until all blasted flesh is ours.
We weep for the sufferings of war,
for the hope that lifts from crane-folding fingers,
tears for the children's cranes of hope
tears for the children, wept from the heart,
salt tears, my friends, that make a start.
