Previously 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