Japan

And when at last it came
to the end of the book
the idea came.
Our imagination
is organic, and a wreck broken off.
And so we continue to imagine,
inspire, and interpret.
War is barbaric like the onset of dementia.

It is something we fail to understand.
The bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Japanese girls are zoo-pretty.
Japan is majestic, an ancient-country.
All its interiors have secrets.
Yet the sky still speaks of blue,
finding the poem, the haiku.
Welcome to Sarajevo, snipers, mass graves.

When seen from afar
Forget this war, forget all places of weeping.
Japan, Sarajevo and Africa.
Earth is simply waiting
for me to describe it.
Instead I speak about Japan and Sarajevo.
Poets who live not in this world of human nature
But rather a cage of their own making and design.

They walk on dirt roads African poets.
With their shamanic wisdom and their sails.
Their words are as old as a telescope, fossils, totem poles,
tribes, trees, Darwinism, the touch of the hands
of my paternal grandmother, antiques,
the coelacanth, the dishes that are waiting
for me in the sink, the footprint of childhood
On the beach sucking a waterfall of sea.

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