The City Wiped Off the Map

This poem is based off of the testimony of Yoichi, from Rikuzentakata, Iwate prefecture who watched his home and parents be swept away by the Tsunami on March 11, 2011. He and his wife were able to find refuge in a school yard that was just above the water line.
I wanted to take this particular’s survivors story to write about because his perspective is a reminder that tragedy does not discriminate, that it can affect anyone. We learn about the effects in numbers during natural disasters but I wanted to bring another side to the equation and humanize the effects of Earthquakes and Tsunamis. Ultimately, even my imagination cannot encompass the horror of what they went through, but I did my best to encompass a theme that is relatable, universal to the tragedy that occurred.

The City Wiped Off the Map

Standing in a school yard
inside a white chalked box
marked on the asphalt, hopscotch
trembling fingers, unbalanced knees
he became a child again- small, helpless
to the body, the gut wrenching despair
that washed in,
over his parents, tangling corpses
like telephone wires.

he watched the city taken by the sharp blade
of her mouth,
shredded into glass, concrete, metal shards-
a new horizon.

it was a terrible game of hide and seek
he thought
how flesh and bone lost meaning under water
like the corroding wood of a sunken ship

sunk with desires, cruelty, ordinary
indistinguishable as the aluminum tails of Ayu
jammed between broken buildings.

from above
he felt her breath, a mucky brown spatter
with kelp and seaweed that stung the air
down below
limbs, faces climbing the sea like drift wood
unstable, powerless

like the city and the minds of the living

all blurred underwater:
eyes burning red from the salt
tears, stinging
with the pain of loss

he held his wife watching her
too small to understand
shaken like a snow globe inside God’s hands -
debris floating down and the warm spray of the sea
sparkling, sprinkling Blood.

afterwards (if there ever is an end)
the Mainichi Daily News declared:
“Rikuzentakata has been erased.”

so they marked the lost city with coordinates
pinned red dots
where the earth broke
where she begged in fury
claws grinding asphalt
as she swallowed mistakes, sin, goodness, memory.

you cannot measure, calculate, quantify this

he tells the bright eyes and quick hands of reporters

Listen:

survivor became an expletive. she took more.

My father
a new city
of wet, slaughtered stone
I
safely marked by white lines
the water could not touch.