A warm afternoon,
and we cry for yesterday.
Nothing is sinful,
just an impulse
to enchain the heart.
 
A few disturb the dust
from jasmine leaves.
Ascending to a summer
retreat, with purpose
and hopes of release.
 
And what of the spring,
white and dead?
Robbed of desire
and spread over
the trees and the sky.
 
I see hope shimmering
on a woman’s blouse.
And when she is gone,
a brushstroke flash –
and tears flow and mingle  
for joy …

 
The was such a place,
supple and infernal,
love breathing and
liquid beating.
Where the Yuhina’s,
recumbent on their
straw beds, breathed
as part of us.
But hammered by tongues,
and weeping verse –
one-by-one a sickness came.
Now, alone in their beds
they shine with loneliness
and there is no breath between us.
Just a form in our hands
and our lips, like a
stone against the sky.
A hard temple,
with plum rain falling –
murmuring the midnight hour.
All that we have left.

Coffee poured
in a silent kitchen.
The sounds of the street,
a long broad tongue.
As I make my way through
hardwood memories.
I still have you,
each day well-rooted.
Between my hands,
between my lips.
Such sweet
morning thoughts.

Eyes of cats running, falling
to drown the dust of war.
A poet said it’s our tragedy.
I say, we must live – not
remember them.
All around me, strange
faces grow intimate –
rumbling and flayed.
As if the earth was an eggshell,
a trauma of the body.

Summer will meet
this year, returning thanks.
At the memory
of the good old days.

The sunshine
chasing after me,
under the silent bell.
A carefree birdsong
echoing the truth.

And in the falling
breeze, I prepared
my words beforehand.

They fly left, fly right
and my soul once
again turns to you.

Aged, of years past.
But full of spring air,
touched by
blue moonlight.
I seek no longing,
just herald another dawn.
Both beautiful and sad.

All around me a sky’s teeth,
inside, a short-lived dream.
Rotting away
from morning to evening.
No rest from these
desolate moors,
and nothing with green grass.
 
When I close my eyes,
a standstill afternoon.
A place in which to talk with you,
and taste that first
hummingbird kiss.
To flourish the
grasses so dull.

Seen from the outside
a perfect sky, a life’s
scroll of spring dreams.
As I come to my grave,
the dreams go wandering.
And paradise, a drone
of mosquitoes,
is taken by the wind.
Among the few roots left,
I rest and cool off –
filling my mind with emptiness.
All that I have borrowed,
the temple bell and the
butterfly, now returned.
Life will find a way.

Lazy afternoons,
and poetry runs free.
But still sadness,
waiting for a rainbow to return.
These words heard
in silken light –
it’s always been you.