from Litanies for Youth (1964)
IV Sleepwalking
A breeze at the doorstep, sparkler-scented
I remembered, then I was out in the street
I had been sleeping
It had been dreamless
A light rain had woken me up
I had left the trolley tracks a hundred
Yards behind. Down the street taxis howled like
Demons. I had crossed in the dark
Disoriented, I turned
I was nowhere at all
I was in the middle of it all
I was scared
So I set out back home
The kennel I passed smelled of straw
The snake-medicine shop smelled of alcohol
The watermelon in a Chinese restaurant gleamed so red
Did they really serve watermelon in Chinese restaurants?
I did not know
The watermelon in a Chinese restaurant gleamed so red
V Budding
One of us drew a grotesque devil for art class.
One of us had a bob cut and sneered when she spoke.
The two of us stained our lips on the local shrine’s
Small purple cherries.
One of us writhed in the crook of that cherry tree
And shouted down: “Save me! Save me!”
I just laughed. We wore the same white kerchiefs:
Grade 1, Class 2.
She climbed down from the tree, glowered at me.
“I wanted to see whether you loved me or not.”
Aesop had his cats, foxes, little devils. Grown up,
We have the dark sweet smell of cherries.
I stared at the purple smear of her lips, trembling
As I kept my first secret in love.
VI Festival of Red
There is nothing to this water; the heat
Of the hand closing around it turns it to steam
It drums on the glass like tumbling
Dice, like a dance of sprites
─The red sound The red sound of sprites on glass
Under a naked storefront bulb
The scrunched-up faces of two kittens at play
Sparring with each other in a picture frame
Bright fruit
─The red taste The red taste of a painted apple
The bottom of the wading pool ripples:
My boat’s tin propeller turns. It runs on
Rubber bands. Its passengers are paper-thin
Painted silhouettes
─The red smell The red smell of fresh paint
Fear of seeing their sharp faces head-on:
No eyes, no ears, only slit mouths laughing at me
The kittens provoke a strange resentment
The sprites inspire strange prayers
from Radiances (1995)
Paradox
The setting sun flushes a far-off snowy peak.
Pheasants hush on stones along the pristine riverbank;
Two children are singing, their soprano voices pure.
The world simply can’t be this beautiful,
Now that I must die.
*
Fatal colors explode deep in night’s vault.
Rock fragments stick in children’s tender throats.
Black snow falls on black seas. The future’s
Lack of beauty hurts me, too,
Now that I must die!
Four Poems
Yoshihara Sachiko
translated from the Japanese by James Garza
Yoshihara Sachiko (1932–2002) was born in Yotsuya, Tokyo. The youngest of four children, she excelled in school and took to reading her siblings’ books. Through them she discovered modernist poets like Hagiwara Sakutarō and Nakahara Chūya. Though she was forced to relocate in 1944 and 1945 to escape the Allied bombings of Tokyo, she returned to find a most encouraging mentor in her high school Japanese teacher, the poet Naka Tarō. After graduating from the University of Tokyo in 1956, Yoshihara entered a period that was to have a profound influence on her writing: she married in 1958, became a mother in 1961, and divorced in 1962. Not long after, she struck up an association (facilitated by Naka Tarō) with the Rekitei group of poets, a movement which placed a distinct emphasis on the recitation and sound value of poetry. Yoshihara’s first collection, Litanies for Youth, appeared in 1964.
James Garza is a writer and translator whose work has appeared in Lunch Ticket, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, and tNY.Press. He holds an M.A. in Japanese studies from the University of Arizona.
