Down on Hiroshima

Lyrics by: Connie Graves
Gaggle: Tucson
Tune: Puff, the Magic Dragon

Down on Hiroshima, the atomic bomb fell,
and children playing in the summer sun burned in a living hell!
Shadows of their bodies marked where they had stood,
imprinted in the very ground of their own neighborhood.

One moment they were playing, the next one they were dead.
as fireballs and hellish heat across them quickly spread.
Toddlers and babies, school-age kids as well,
incinerated in the blast that sounded their death knell.

Japanese survivors still suffer the effects,
their children still are born with devastating birth defects.
Radioactive fallout led to deaths the bomb’s blamed for,
as weakness and disease killed thousands more postwar..

What’s worse is that the war had already been won
no atom bomb was needed – we could have let their lives go on
but Uncle Sam had a new weapon that hadn’t yet been tried,
so Japan was chosen for its test and the U.S. watched with pride.

Despite all the rhetoric of the threat of atomic power
in the hands of third world countries or an Al Quaida saboteur,
the fact is that only America. has ever really used
the bomb against real people – the U.S. stands accused!

Let’s destroy the bombs and make them disappear
so families and children no longer have to fear.
The threat of nuclear warfare needs to be displaced,
and America must stop leading the nuclear arms race!