Japan–U.S. Peace Treaty ReadingPreviously published in various journals. I read these tanka on 9 September 2001 at the Japan Day celebration at Hakone Gardens in Saratoga, California (where I also used to teach haiku workshops). This reading was part of the fiftieth-anniversary celebrations in honour of the 1951 Japan–U.S. Peace Treaty. It is hard to believe how the world would change just two days later.
Two poems in memory of pioneer tanka poet and longtime Saratoga resident Pat Shelley, who died in 1996:
words do not come for you on your passing till the first warm day— the blossoming plum
April comes and now you are gone, you, who told your guardian angel each year on your birthday not yet
Two poems written in response to writing by others:
I’d abandon all my peaches to exceed my joy from a thousand nightly dreams— just one nod from you passing in the market
(after Ono no Komachi)
the book of love poems laid aside . . . through the window I see a man and woman get into a London taxi (after Virginia Woolf)
Four poems of yearning for love:
an overcast day without rain— she sends me email to tell me of her new boyfriend
I am at your door, knocking— as I turn away in a gathering rain I wonder if you stand at my door, knocking, knocking
this cold lonely night without you, with no chance of seeing you again, how I wish I could turn off the moon
this is but a moonless night, and my pillow has no tear stains— it is in the grocery aisle amid the frozen vegetables that I long for you +
Four love poems:
our ladder propped against the gutter— you turn to see if I am here steadying it
a snail has left its delicate silver trail on my book of love poems left out on your porch overnight
all my books collect dust except the one of love poems you gave me that day when the spring rains kept us indoors
at last we depart after lingering in embrace— the echo of your footsteps in the fog
Four poems on contemporary topics:
dried persimmons on the kitchen counter— again you tell me of your son’s promotion
puddles in the gutter . . . a man sleeps in the darkened doorway of the pet shelter
I tell her I grow old have a paunch and need new clothes that the wild geese have flown and winter is approaching —my mother laughs
overcast sky— for the first time I wonder where my parents will be buried
Two poems on nuclear bombs, in the hope that no nuclear bomb is ever dropped again:
Los Alamos tour guide discusses nuclear weapons— as I walk into window light her voice grows fainter
a book on Hiroshima— in the picture of survivors the one man with closed eyes
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