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

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

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.

 

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.