A counterfactual description of a Japanese kamikaze attack on American troops on Whitsun 20 May 1945. Mixing Sylvia Plath, science fiction and T S Eliot’s Little Gidding, this poem imagines the attack being stopped by the descendants of the combatants. Is it possible that the past can be changed? Not redefined or explained differently, but changed? And how could that happen?
Whitsun 1945
What he meant
was a steep descent
out of the sun
through clouds of flak
into the bridge or deck
of a transport full of men.
Divine Wind.
Kamikaze.
In this facsimile
tongues of flame and smoke
from both engines
just before the moment broke
with all its carnage,
and the glossolalia of horror
in the universal language
of men about to die.
The intensity of life
and the density of matter
and the chrysanthemum of fire
in the instant of the rapture
when everything makes sense.
Instead, a sudden intervention
of something like imagination
in minds so fast
aeons could pass
before that plane would hit.
More than time enough
to reach and disconnect
a part or tip a wing in flight,
effect a change of course,
the ship to turn around
and head for home unharmed.
And the frightened teenaged suicide
squeaks past uncrashed
down the port side,
and everyone returns,
blinking and confused.
And so they plant the rice
and grow the corn,
and raise the children
whose children’s children
can now be born,
compassionate and kind
and, reaching back through time
with their different minds,
stop the war long before
the war itself began,
this just some footage for a film
that never ran.