< atom bomb >

[rayheinrich]

Strange effect.

atom bomb (my eyes dilate)
sunflower (my eyes dilate)
goes unseen (but, but, but...)

I have to learn about this haiku. Google time.
Umm...thanks!

Disclaimer:
A poem doesn't mean what it's writer thinks it means;
it means what its readers think it means. I'm one of
those readers and I intended that my car would miss you.

So... on re-reading the damn thing:

1. Dead people can't see flowers.

2. Live people can't see vaporized flowers.

3. 'Sunflower' is metaphor for 'atom bomb'
(the intensity of the sun, flowering out over the earth).

4. 'Atom bomb' is a metaphor for sunflower.
(primal forces of nature, etc.)

5. 'Unseen' as 'eyes averted'
The magnitude of the suffering of those in
Hiroshima was unseen by those elsewhere,
especially those that dropped the atom bomb
(by governmental and personal rationalization
and denial).

6. The traumatic intensity of the atom bomb
blinds us (victim, victimizer, both) to
nature, to our part in nature, to our natures.

7. The heat radiation from an atom bomb moves at
close to the speed of light; much, much faster
than the speed of our retinas to form an image.
The people close enough (but not close enough to
be vaporized) and looking in the general direction
of the bomb burst were blinded so quickly (retinas
burned) that their last image was the sky of a
summer's morning.