Sleeping
When the wind about to unravel her hair runs down through the thicket, it becomes a flame.
When the wind about to unravel her hair runs down through the thicket, it becomes a flame.
She brings an unbecoming golden ring.
Turning and turning it, she tosses it out into the air.
With all physical impediments, as is the case with plants, people
understood and conquered them with their entire bodies and then wanted to spring back up.
However, at the temple the bell does not ring.
Because they had their blue veins bared, and their backs were the night.
I briefly watched the garden wither at the far end of the sky.
The tree that pulls away from its leaves, like memories getting discarded. That thicket is already gone.
The day is long; the lives that decay fill the depressed earth with red.
And then autumn rises by our feet.
Chika Sagawa, the pen name of Aiko Kawasaki, was born in 1911 in Hokkaido, Japan. One of Japan’s first female Modernist poets, Sagawa was posthumously published by under the title Sagawa Chika Shishu (Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa) in 1936.
Sawako Nakayasu is an artist working with language, performance, and translation—separately and in various combinations. Her books include The Ants (Les Figues Press), Texture Notes (Letter Machine Editions), the translation of Tatsumi Hijikata’s Costume en Face: A Primer of Darkness for Young Boys and Girls (UDP), The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Canarium Books), and Mouth: Eats Color – Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-translations, & Originals (Rogue Factorial), a multilingual work of both original and translated poetry.
