Okinawa by Hasegawa Kai is a stirring meditation full of powerful, haunting imagery on the death and destruction left behind by war and its long-term effects on culture, people, and environment. In some of the poems he zooms out, writing critically, universally, about our home (our planet), and how our species behaves. He does this in poems that reflect not just on the past and the present, and their collisions, but also on the future. The overall effect is that a kind of consecration is being performed. The poems remind me of the following from Makoto Ueda’s Matsuo Basho, a kind of definition for haiku: “mature comments on man and his environment.”
The collection is translated by David Burleigh and available from Red Moon Press.
human remains—
right inside the mouth
green pampas grass
.
the glare
of the burning sun
saddened by the earth
.
listen to
the far-the off grieving
of the summer tide
.
the enormous sunset—
Okinawa has no place
to return
.
the silence after
the earth’s destruction—
the Milky Way
—
is/let 