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Manuscripts full of abracadabra, romances out of date,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.