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Student Letter

By Stephen Sandy b. 1934 Stephen Sandy

After the declaration by emperor

to stop the war

many people in Tokyo killed themselves,

for instance, in front of the imperial palace.

But few people knows those facts.

Hence you must teach me

where you got the news or what sort of book

gave you the fact that quite few people knows.

To know the fact of our nation’s subjection

is not so comfortable

but the fact of many people’s spontaneous death

gives me more complicated feelings.

In the matter of what William Gass said

I must describe my feelings. I went

to Nagasaki

on an educational trip four years ago.

I can recollect those serious moment

which was given by the beamed materials

in the memorial hall.

But most youth after the war

are indifferent to those

nightmares

because of our no experience. Surely,

I think, those barbarious conducts

shouldn’t be forgiven or forgotten at all

and we must not close our eyes

to the rebombing

at any place

in this world.

In conclusion I may say that most people

except sufferers

or the like

will not have ill feelings toward your country

but they will reproach

the suffocative fact

in history.

Where were you when the World War II was over.

Please share your experience of the war with me.

I’m now interested in the wars concerned with Japan

for the past 100 years. If you tell me your reflections

I can suspect more seriously.

You have abandoned such cursed things as useless?

In that war 3 million people were killed

on the side of our nation, especially

three hundred thousand people by the A-bomb.

Over the war between the imperialism

and militarism America won a victory.

What does this word mean?

Source: The Thread (Louisiana State University Press, 1998)

Biography

Stephen Sandy studied poetry with Robert Lowell and Archibald MacLeish, earned a PhD from Harvard University, and traveled to Japan on a Fulbright Visiting Lectureship. He is the author of more than a half dozen collections of poetry and has been honored with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Council on the Arts, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation.

Stephen Sandy’s collections include Riding to . . .

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