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Update 4/13: Added a title. Also, realized that everyone in Japan's last name is NOT Akaiwa.
Aita 愛他
Hideaki Akaiwa proved something.
So did Susuma Sugawara.
And the Fukushima Fifty.
They proved that no matter the odds
When disaster strikes…
People go absolutely insane.
Watched videos of water rushing over his hometown
And standing on the border of hopeless and action
Between the rational and the insane,
He stepped forward.
Wrapped himself in plastic bags and descended
Into a freshly-buried Atlantis,
He was going to find his family.
From a grip as cold as seawater,
He freed his wife, his mother and some dozen others.
Reporters pressed their microphones close,
Asked him “Why?”
“She is very important for me”.
Not important like an office deadlines,
Important like moving faster than emergency,
Leaping headfirst into a smouldering apocalypse
Without even waiting for the fire to die down.
Important like Hideaki Akaiwa’s hands
To drowning strangers.
Susuma Suguwara waved aside passing boats
Warning of the rising deep
The 60-foot wall of water
Moving to engulf his home, Oshima.
His boat, Sunflower
She could outrun it,
Full-speed they could survive.
But Oshima would be gone, helpless half-sunk beneath the waves.
The wrinkles of his hand
Met the dings of her hull,
And together they made a choice.
The voice of other sailors cried “Stop!”
The chill of doomed wind whispered “No more”
Above the roar of full-throttle
Susuma said to Sunflower
“If we live or we die, then we’ll be together”.
They climbed as one, the mountain range of ocean,
They came so close to Heaven
That the slightest nudge would send them there.
But together, they lived.
The rescue team before the rescue team
They saved lives like they risked their own.
Man and machine, a team
More than exists between
My hands and a computer screen.
News of Fukushima spread like a pox
Twenty miles around cleared of human life,
Closed off with strict quarantine.
When the order came to leave the plant,
It made sense.
Radiation kills swiftly
Survival to those that move faster,
And any sane worker picked up and ran.
But when the warning came,
Two hundred stayed.
Put on meager white hoods
And asked what they could do.
The Fukushima Fifty, the rotating enterprise of the insane,
Walk through the pitch black reactor
The air thick with hazard,
The enemy burning their innards,
Each hour taking years from their lives.
“We’ll stay” They say
“We’ll stay and if that means we’ll go, we’ll go.”
A job without overtime
A job without vacation leave
When death goes from possibility to eventuality,
It stops being just a job.
In a time when bombs fly faster than justifications
These few prove that when the going gets tough,
We are unreasonable.
It is an epidemic,
From the meltdown of Chernobyl
To the ruins of twin towers,
Humanity has a tendency towards insanity,
Towards choices that would make Darwin scratch his head
And psychiatrists write out prescriptions.
And though philosophers disagree
Say selfishness pumps like red in our veins,
We still try.
Fasten plastic bags against sunken wreckage,
Old fishing boats against tsunamis,
Plastic goggles against unleashed nature,
We try.
And if we go, we go.
If we die, we die together,
We are important to each other,
A love we will never feel
But will always know is there.
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