Returning to his old home

The empty house
With no-one there
Is harder even
Than when I journeyed,
Grass for my pillow.

With my wife,
Together we made it -
Our garden with its streams.
Now the trees grow tall and rank.

My wife planted
This plum tree.
When I look on it
My heart chokes,
And the tears well up.

Ōmoto Tabito (665-731)


What should we write about?

1

What should we write about? Should we set
our poems in living rooms? Make elegies
for failed or failing partnerships?

We drift apart like the continents.
Are our little failures and farewells
as broad as the the whole world?

Tabito's was a private
moment, but he let us read
his diary for that day.

His solitary grief
migrates around the earth,
across the centuries;

it comes to rest
on a chair-back in Starbucks,
and folds its wings.

He knew that tears and trees
outlive the Emperor Shômu
and all the powers to come.

What did he know
of countries to the west?
Had he learned

from the Chinese
about the Syrian earthquake, or the latest
European horse-ploughs?

Would he have made
poems about these?
Perhaps, but what he did

was good enough. His grief
comes to land nearby,
and evokes our tears.

2

Should we live only in the histories
of our living-rooms and gardens?
We live at a time when the world

is near at hand; we know the places
where cities are rank and the poor
die young. We know

about the little witches of Kinshasa,
children who have tantrums or who cry
all night, or are too quiet, and are named

the devil's children, conjurers of disease
and hunger, poisoners of water.
We know they are put to death

for the unmagical crimes of others.
We know the history, or can find it
in Wikipedia: of the Congo as Leopold's

Domaine privé, his tropical
Tom Tiddler's ground where his overseers
farmed rubber, ivory, and severed hands;

where men of the Force publique
hanged children, raped women and beheaded men,
and Leopold banked twenty million,

two gold francs for every corpse. We know
how forty years ago the new Republic's
hands were severed: Patrice Lumumba

murdered, and a Western servant-tyrant
established instead of hope. If thieving
were an art (perhaps it is) Mobutu Sese Seko

would be its Mozart. While roadways crumbled,
and hospitals ran out of drugs, and schools
of tarp to patch the roof, his personal courier

flew daily back and forth to Zurich. He's dead
of cancer now, but there are wars and wars,
and little soldiers eight years old defend

the warlords and their gold and coltan mines,
and the dispossessed migrate and settle
in the shanty suburbs of Kinshasa,

where the Pentecostals pray all night, and speak
in tongues, and sell the sort of consolation
that religion sells, and lay

the cruelties of the world on little children.
Can we write about these things? Can I,
here in this quiet semi with security lights

and a garden full of roses and astilbes,
and a keyboard in a corner - can I know
the shanty suburbs of Kinshasa?

3

It is possible. I will not forget
I am a stranger there, but it is possible.
We are different, but the same.

We are the same and different.
What is the same, we know already.
What's different, we can learn.

The world is near at hand.
Imagination, curiosity and love
will fly us to Kinshasa. It is possible.