The Korean Memorial at Hiroshima: A poem by Andrew Motion

Former poet laureate Andrew Motion's poem The Korean Memorial at Hiroshima is featured as The Guardian's poem of the week.

The poem is below. I enjoy poetry, but am nowhere near confident enough to attempt criticism and analysis. Luckily Carol Rumens has done a great job of that,  so click please click through to the piece on the Guardian and see what she has to say  and if you agree. 

The Korean Memorial at Hiroshima

 There was hardly time
between the Peace Museum
and the bullet train to Tokyo,
but our hosts instructed the taxi
to find the memorial to the Koreans.
Ten thousand Koreans, killed that morning.
You, being Korean, had to see it.

*
We had been crying in the Museum:
the charred school uniforms;
the lunch-box with its meal of charcoal,
the shadow of a seated woman
printed on the steps of a bank.
Everyone else was crying, too.
We shuffled round in a queue,
crying and saying nothing.
Then we stood in the rain
squaring up to the Memorial.
A spike of rusty flowers
and a tide-scum of dead cherry blossom.
Five or six miniature ceremonial costumes
made of folded paper and left to moulder.
Pink. Pink and custard yellow.
You could hardly leave soon enough.
*
The taxi was on its last legs,
sputtering among black cherries
then stalling by the skeleton
of the one dome to survive the blast.
No need to worry about the train, though.
The trains in Japan run on time.
In two hours and fifteen minutes
we would see Mount Fuji,
cloud-cover permitting,
and the snow-cap like a table-cloth
stretched over a tumbler of water
in the moment of surprise
before a magician taps his wand
and the tumbler disappears.