"Welcome to Hiroshima" by Mary Jo Salter

Mary Jo Salter is an American poet originally from Grand Rapids Michigan. She has written poetry along with writing textbooks and teaching classes at Johns Hopkins University.

Welcome to Hiroshima

is what you first see, stepping off the train:
a billboard brought to you in living English
by Toshiba Electric. While a channel
silent in the TV of the brain

projects those flickering re-runs of a cloud
that brims its risen columnful like beer
and, spilling over, hangs its foamy head,
you feel a thirst for history: what year

it started to be safe to breathe the air,
and when to drink the blood and scum afloat
on the Ohta River. But no, the water’s clear,
they pour it for your morning cup of tea

in one of the countless sunny coffee shops
whose plastic dioramas advertise
mutations of cuisine behind the glass:
a pancake sandwich; a pizza someone tops

with a maraschino cherry. Passing by
the Peace Park’s floral hypocenter (where
how bravely, or with what mistaken cheer,
humanity erased its own erasure),

you enter the memorial museum
and through more glass are served, as on a dish
of blistered grass, three mannequins. Like gloves
a mother clips to coatsleeves, strings of flesh

hang from their fingertips; or as if tied
to recall a duty for us, Reverence
the dead whose mourners too shall soon be dead,
but all commemoration’s swallowed up

in questions of bad taste, how re-created
horror mocks the grim original,
and thinking at last They should have left it all
you stop. This is the wristwatch of a child.

Jammed on the moment’s impact, resolute
to communicate some message, although mute,
it gestures with its hands at eight-fifteen
and eight-fifteen and eight-fifteen again

while tables of statistics on the wall
update the news by calling on a roll
of tape, death gummed on death, and in the case
adjacent, an exhibit under glass

is glass itself: a shard the bomb slammed in
a woman’s arm at eight-fifteen, but some
three decades on—as if to make it plain
hope’s only as renewable as pain,

and as if all the unsung
debasements of the past may one day come
rising to the surface once again—
worked its filthy way out like a tongue. 

The title of the poem "Welcome to Hiroshima" immediately implants in the mind of the audience that the poem will be solemn due to the dropping of the atomic bomb in World War II. This thought is swiftly stripped away in the whimsicality of the first stanza such as when Salter writes, "a billboard brought to you in living English by Toshiba Electric." Salter continues this style throughout the majority of the poem, creating an ironic tone, while the setting and situation within it deal with the deaths of thousands of people. The pragmatic manner in which the speaker discusses such details as the time on the watch of the woman creates a sense that Hiroshima itself has moved on. With the poem seeming ironic, Salter may be trying to hint that the rest of the world needs to see Hiroshima as more that just the site of an explosion, but a city that has recovered from complete devastation and is now flourishing. 

The manner in which the speaker describes many of the artifacts from the blast is downright disturbing at times. In describing the skin of one of the bodies, "like gloves of a mother clips to coatsleeves, strings of flesh hang from their fingertips," the speaker almost seems detached from the entirety of the situation and it is as if the speaker is just watching a movie or a video of science fiction. There is a lack of reverence throughout, while maintaining knowledge of the situation such as when the speaker states that, "a shard the bomb slammed in a woman's arm at eight-fifteen," which leads me to the conclusion that it is in fact an ironic piece, but it comes across as morbid due to the gravity of the context.