Kamikaze

"Kamikaze" was written by contemporary British poet Beatrice Garland and published in The Invention of Fireworks (2013). The title refers to Japanese pilots during World War II tasked with flying a suicide mission. With planes full of explosives and just enough fuel to make it to their target, kamikaze pilots had to fly directly at American warships to inflict maximum damage—killing themselves in the process. The poem tells the story of one particular pilot who decides to turn back, prompted by a childhood memory of his brother and father by the sea. Upon his return, however, his whole family disown him—including the poem's main speaker, his daughter. 

Kamikaze

Her father embarked at sunrise

with a flask of water, a samurai sword

in the cockpit, a shaven head

full of powerful incantations

and enough fuel for a one-way

journey into history

but half way there, she thought,

recounting it later to her children,

he must have looked far down

at the little fishing boats

strung out like bunting

on a green-blue translucent sea

and beneath them, arcing in swathes

like a huge flag waved first one way

then the other in a figure of eight,

the dark shoals of fishes

flashing silver as their bellies

swivelled towards the sun

and remembered how he

and his brothers waiting on the shore

built cairns of pearl-grey pebbles

to see whose withstood longest

the turbulent inrush of breakers

bringing their father’s boat safe

– yes, grandfather’s boat – safe

to the shore, salt-sodden, awash

with cloud-marked mackerel,

black crabs, feathery prawns,

the loose silver of whitebait and once

a tuna, the dark prince, muscular, dangerous.

And though he came back

my mother never spoke again

in his presence, nor did she meet his eyes

and the neighbours too, they treated him

as though he no longer existed,

only we children still chattered and laughed

till gradually we too learned

to be silent, to live as though

he had never returned, that this

was no longer the father we loved.

And sometimes, she said, he must have wondered

which had been the better way to die.

Beatrice Garland