Yasushi Ikeda

---ESSAY---

Tart or thunderbolt or ...

Some may say a poem is a small tart of never ever experienced taste made with languages. I would rather say it is like a sudden thunderbolt in the blue sky. This is nothing other than the Japanese (Chinese?) proverb "青天の霹靂"(seiten no hekireki) meaning something unexpected appears all of a sudden in a striking and fascinating way. This thunderbolt may come from the sea of dream. Then this flash and thundering have some existential root. And I imagine this thunderbolt may not have the shape of lightning in the sky. It may well be a pebble or a fragment of glass giving out superb shine of a jewel. 

A poet stands on the shore of the sea of dream, wanders and finds something small and beautiful and enigmatic. He or she picks it up and watch carefully. This is the pivotal deed of poetry. A magic tart is sure to delight tongues and eyes and noses. A thunderbolt cannot help surprising eyes and ears and hearts. A tiny enchanting drift on the spiritual shore will have the potential to describe a tremendous amount of secrets kept unseen in the world. A twig of a thunderbolt drifting along the border of day(consciousness) and night(unconsciousness) is omniscient.

Yasushi Ikeda

Student

A student plays the paper piano

Penniless and inexperienced

Anxious and frenzied

Chaotic but proud

There is no sound

But surely music is here

Paper piano is piano itself

Anyone can play it

No one can play it

The sacred instrument creates

Murmuring bubbles gold and silver

Flying soon to vanish

When you play the paper piano

Something thoroughly pure comes

Take out your piano from your pocket

Put your fingers softly on it

And here comes from the world bottom

Faint rhythm and rhyme

Muses' glimmering dream

Every song and music hides

deep in itself

You

A student playing the paper piano

Turfalko

Veins of rain...

Veins of rain

on the glass

autumn colors

under the gray

sky

through the landscape

we explore

motionless

other worlds

other leaves

other memories

always traveling

we cross

alone

and nothing

we need

through existence

through the flow of time

we move

unpossessingly

sunlit and peaceful

the exit

we greet

Turfalko

Music is our spice...

Music is our spice

music is lucid dreams

pure awareness

sounds

silence

atmospheric travels

through consciousness

drawn waves

on the sand

new mindsets

emerge

from depth

noises bloom

music softens

fractal motions

in the loom

entwined threads

of minds

tones mutiny

rhythms revolt

wordlessly

voices appeal

Tim Taylor

Leaves



Born of the sunlight,


cracking bud coccoons


they stretch and fill their veins like butterflies.


Tethered to the tree that bore them,


they do not take wing


but they can dance, ecstatic


in the first wild gusts of spring.


They revel in their newness, playing


with the wind a whispered symphony in green.


They must make the most of these times


for, unlike the tree, they soon grow old.


Autumn gives them one last flourish,


painting them in red and brown and gold


but soon the wind that was their friend


will tear them from their homes


and then, at last


the leaves will learn to fly

NIJO Cenka

Pangaea’s Dining Table

 

Do you remember the children of Pangaea?

Every morning they sat around a large table,

laughing without a single worry.

They didn’t need to speak—

their hearts were always one,

just as the land they lived on had once been one.

 

Long ago, that land broke apart

and drifted away to distant places across a wide sea.

Still, no one truly believed it.

(For if that were the case,

how could they share their meals,

warm themselves in the sun,

or sing their songs together?)

But the children never spoke such questions aloud.

When hearts are always one,

what one child does not know

is something no one knows.

 

Yasushi Ikeda

A portrait of an old poetess

She insists 

Time be the sun and the moon going in the dark

Clock be that fig tree fond of being mute 

Whatever is mechanically activated be just a toy.

She eats

Fifty-language-corn soup, satire-flavored ice cream,

Manuscripts full of abracadabra, romances out of date,

Bad tempered criticism, inspiration born in savage land.

ONAI Kotaro

The Sound Country

Under Shin-Hamamatsu station

There's the semicircular space

The piano sits there

February 2025

Poets gather in that semicircular space

Snow begins to fall in the afternoon

Snow never accumulate

Poetry readings begin

A Osaka poet sings Tagwa's national anthem while playing the ukulele

Mid-song, a female poet collapses

Her gaze becomes unfocused

Foam comes from her mouth

The anthem is interrupted

Tim Taylor

The Busker

He seems, at first, a sorry figure:

the hair that once leaped down his back 

in waterfalls of golden brown,

now just a thin white halo round his head.

Each year of fish and chips

washed down with Carlsberg Special in a Transit van

has left another ring of beer gut round his waist.

But watch the grin

that creases his red face as he plugs in.

Yuko Minamikawa Adams

Piano 

A grand piano is standing in my living room.

She is my grandmother.

She is a skeleton with no keys left.

In her youth, everything touched her:

fingers, breezes, petals.

She responded with cheerful music.

When she became Mother,

She started dropping her keys, one by one.

These are my mother, uncles, aunts

and then me.