Wake Up!
POETRY FORMAT, 3 Aug 2015
David Krieger, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation – TRANSCEND Media Service
David Krieger
The alarm is sounding.
Can you hear it?
Can you hear the bells
of Nagasaki
ringing out for peace?
Can you feel the heartbeat
of Hiroshima
pulsing out for life?
The survivors of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki
are growing older.
Their message is clear:
Never again!
Wake up!
Now, before the feathered arrow
is placed into the bow.
Now, before the string
of the bow is pulled taut,
the arrow poised for flight.
Now, before the arrow is let loose,
before it flies across oceans
and continents.
Now, before we are engulfed in flames,
while there is still time, while we still can,
Wake up!
________________________________
David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment. He has a new collection of poems entitled Awake! For more visit the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation website: www.wagingpeace.org.
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 3 Aug 2015.
Anticopyright: Editorials and articles originated on TMS may be freely reprinted, disseminated, translated and used as background material, provided an acknowledgement and link to the source, TMS: Wake Up!, is included. Thank you.
If you enjoyed this article, please donate to TMS to join the growing list of TMS Supporters.
This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 License.
The poem above is very important. I appreciate it very much. Here below, allow me to add as a set of three supplementary claims to the poem:
—
First:
Seventy years ago today, August 6, 1945, the first nuclear bomb was used to kill a mass of people. Seventy years after and until today August 6, 2015, what did we, humans, learn from the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Unfortunately, more countries have attempted to obtain this mass-killing weapon since the tragedies in 1945. Unfortunately, more sophisticated rhetoric for the justification of the use of the nuclear weapon has been developed. Even some politicians and some scholars have been looking for a legal hole to justify the use of the nuclear weapon in the pre-emptive attack.
Let them remember Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights even if how many times they laugh at or ridicule this universal norm, possibly considered as a “universal” soft law:
Article 1:
“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”
—
Second:
Article 9 (aka “A9”) of the Constitution of Japan stipulates as follows:
Article 9:
“Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.
“(2) To accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.”
I have a proposal here, which is to let the US Security Council or UN General Assembly prepare a new resolution on the prohibition of the use of the nuclear weapon by rewriting A9 as follows:
A new UNSC or UNGA resolution:
“Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, we the peoples of the United Nations forever renounce ‘nuclear weapons’ as a sovereign right of ‘any Member State’ and the threat or use of the ‘nuclear weapon’ as means of settling international disputes.
“(2) To accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air ‘nuclear’ forces, as well as other nuclear potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency, ‘in the use of the nuclear weapon,’ of the ‘State’ will not be recognized.”
Please note, by the way, that the 70th anniversary of the UN General Assembly will be held next month, September 2015. And the 70th anniversary of the UN Day will be on October 24, 2015.
—
Third:
It is time to switch the way of thinking from “Kill them, or they will kill us.” to “Treat them as your brothers and sisters, and all of us on this planet will survive.”
That is a switch from “fear and hatred” to “compassion and love”
===