Plea for Peace

A Picture Postcard Prayer

Dear Fellow Human,

I send this postcard to you from Hiroshima, home of the hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors), who won the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize. I came here expecting to visit a war memorial but find only a monument to peace, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Its main building, as pictured on this card, perch atop gleaming white pillars on a glorious sunny day. It’s Fountain of Prayer’s watery arms stretching from pools to heavens, pleading for peace. Visiting yesterday, I glanced back with a sigh at a sparkling sky, perhaps not unlike the sky that bore the plane Enola Gay on that frightful day, before turning to descend the circular ramp down, down, down to the depths of a dark day in human history. Every photo, every piece of tattered ashy clothing, every scrap of ragged rubble laid out on display tells a story that screams “never forget!” As I wound my way, I suddenly stopped, stared, stood agape. There before me lay a relic that, in my imagination, told a story of a carefree child at play, a story that rent my heart and wrung my soul: a tricycle twisted, torn, and charred. What more is there to say?