Poetry
Charles Potts
The Great English VerbsThe great English verbs To be and to have Reduce life to the basic question: Where are you and what have you got? Which means they are about Position and possession. You must be strong if you Would keep your balance. The great Japanese verbs Kuru and suru To come and to do Render Japanese interrogative life as What did you come here to do? Which means they are about Aggression and activity, The ability and intention to move toward The things you want with style. What happens when we blend Any or all four of these together in Dynamic juxtaposition? To be and to do Something beautiful Where I am With what I've got I've got to get there first. Come where we are to have Something to do. What nonverbal life would be like We can't even imagine. Moromi CranesIn the shrines on Nagasaki hill Where the bomb kept time with eternity Festoons of colorful origami cranes Turn Nagasaki into a prayer. On the other side of Kyushu in Fukuoka The Moromi River widens at the mouth through rocked up banks As it reaches through the artificial beaches of Momochihama On half-filled or half-empty Hakata Bay. It was in Hakata Bay that the typhoon swamped The Mongol Armada and saved Japan From the fate of death in 1187 With a Kamikaze Divine Wind. In the Moromi River bottom when the tide is out Moromi Cranes stalk the mudflats one foot at a time, In dirty white feathers and Hip-hop crest, With spike legs and intently focused eyes. The Moromi Cranes acquired more company when the tide went way out. Clammers, oyster gatherers, children and mothers in rubber boots, Fishermen who ordinarily poled from the fraying edges, Went down in extraordinary numbers to comb the mud for food. Midway across the Moromi suspended in space and capped with a crane The median thrust of a new highway bridge hung in the incomplete monumental air For months until spring came and construction recommenced the ratcheting out Of section by section as the bridge unfolded through space towards The hill in Atagohama with a Shinto Shrine on its indelicate top. I see cranes by the intricate triangle lattice work dozens Topping off half-baked buildings, constructing and deconstructing real estate From platforms of civic permission While the white birds screech and take a darting step When there was nothing worth sticking a neck out and a beak in the mud for. The tide raised the boats and set them back down in the mud. I wanted another language bright enough to write in, Found instead a towering monument of superficially deferential social control, Found my escape hatch shattered in a broken talky dream, Sought gustatory salvation in yaki soba and nambam tori or barbarian chicken. I'll probably never get back to Nagasaki Or anywhere else in intensified Japan, Where I dug not the answer I was looking for Out from under three or more distinct kinds of exfoliating cranes, Out of the matrix in Fukuoka, Out of my mind and ordinary life for awhile, Before lifting my tired mistaken eyes to watch What was going on around me Turn staler by degrees in the trapped sunset |