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| Ito Hiromi, (center) with Jeffrey Angles & Jerome Rothenberg [On March 11, 2011, northeastern A huge earthquake, a huge tsunami People die and just moments later There’s the nuclear meltdown Drawn-out fear assaults us Each time I go to It is darker Hot and humid there It stings In Everyone was afraid Everybody was angry Neko has been my close friend for thirty years Cooking is her profession I had a dream, she said We were coming home after going to see the giant sequoias I was driving She was nodding off next to me but then suddenly woke And began saying, when I was young I had a dream I had a baby The baby was with me But I couldn’t breastfeed it The baby was dying right before my eyes But I couldn’t breastfeed it That was how the dream went Maybe That was from a past life And that karma Is the reason I now cook Morning and night like this Feeding the children Of other people Now she is doing something She calls the “Nicomaru Cookie” project First she called the young women in In All alone and anxious And unable to stand it any longer All of them in All of them made cookies And sold them And sent the proceeds to the disaster zone And then she changed gears and brought to The food the people in the disaster zone had made And sold it in the city She worked her fingers to the bone And hired some staff And went to the disaster zone And cooked She went into town And started collecting signatures for an anti-nuclear petition She made dozens of dishes each day Even though she had her parents to care for Even though she was working Her fingers to the bone She moves around, in the crisis The only thing she knew to do Was to cook like that The only thing she could do She couldn’t help but cook And work her fingers to the bone And I watched her do it Powerless, useless There is an expression Take the dirt from under someone’s nails Boil it and make it into tea It means to admire someone so much You would do those things I asked her for some and she gave it to me When I made it into tea It was sour and sweet Poets wrote poetry The thoughts rained down continuously Drenching us to the bone So many poems were written Like Kaneko Misuzu Even easier to understand than Kaneko Misuzu Unsightly poems Boring poems But still they were read They say people read them and wept I heard lots of stories like that Don’t cry Don’t write Don’t miss out From that perspective They cannot say no The poets Who can do nothing but write Cannot say no to writing They cannot relate except Through writing They must not Say no They must not Fail to be read Yesterday Jeffrey Asked me to help him with a translation Some American poet had written a poem about the disaster I tried reading it, but it was a complete cliché That guy Had not even been to He wrote the poem looking at pictures Complete cliché But that guy had seen pictures of the disaster He saw them And his heart was moved So he had no choice but write The clichés he tried to convey In a clichéd way ended up clichés But still it was a good poem I could not write After all, the places I live Are in There was no shaking The radioactivity didn’t reach us I didn’t want to write I couldn’t write A clichéd poem Like that guy in I could not do a thing The only thing I did Was to translate and read out loud the second part of An Account of My I took that old text that depicted so vividly The earthquakes The tsunamis Nine hundred years ago Put it into my own voice And sent out my voice like this Around the same time, we suffered another terrible earthquake Unparalleled in its force The mountains collapsed, the rivers were buried The sea crashed in, inundating the land The earth broke, water bubbled up The boulders split and tumbled into the valleys The boats plying the water were tossed by the waves The horses traveling the roads were unable to keep their footing In one area of the capital, no place, no building Escaped unscathed, they collapsed or leaned to the side Dust and ashes and smoke billowed up Both the sound of the moving earth and the collapsing houses Were just like peals of thunder Those who were inside were crushed on the spot Those who ran were swallowed up by the cracks in the earth … The worst of the shaking continued for a while then stopped The aftershocks continued for some time Everyday, twenty, thirty times a day There were aftershocks large enough to terrify us ordinarily Ten days went by, twenty days went by, receeding into the past There were four or five aftershocks per day, then two or three Then every other day, then two or three days in between The aftershocks continued for three months This way The earthquake The tsunami Crept into my body (just a little) And then I read the Buddhist classics For instance, the Lotus Sutra, I am always Asking myself, how can I Share the truth with living beings Share the Buddha’s teachings Or the Amida Sutra, All who want To be born in the land of happiness Or all who will one day request that Or who are requesting that right now They will all awake to the truth, they will not return To the confusion Or the Nirvana Sutra, Each and every living being Has the heart of the Buddha That’s right, it was Mahayana Buddhism That said so clearly to the Buddhists of the time During an era when they were reading for all they were worth Not sure if they understood or not But obsessed with grasping the truth You are wrong Entirely wrong First you help people That is what it is to be a bodhisattva All I’ve experienced is an earthquake and tsunami nine hundred years ago But if I were to put into my own words And deliver a message to This wounded Damaged Frightened Trembling society That’s no doubt what it would be That would be best Or So I hope If not then I would not even know Which direction to turn note. Over the last three decades Hiromi Itō has emerged as one of the most important & highly regarded poets in Itō’s first book of poems in English, Killing Kanoko, is still in print from Action Books, & a number of postings from other works, also translated by Jeffrey Angles, have appeared several times on Poems and Poetics. |
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