This blog is maintained by the participants of "Herb Port of Poets" (https://herbport.blogspot.com). Poems bound by themes, poems free from themes, and essays on literature and art are posted here. The poem theme of the second half (July-December) of 2025 is "MUSIC".
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Manuscripts full of abracadabra, romances out of date,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.
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
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.
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.
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...