Small Bird in a Dismembered Landscape

Image borrowed from Bing


SMALL BIRD IN A DISMEMBERED LANDSCAPE

What’s right
about this head
that’s cut off from its body?

These fingers cut off from their hands,
these feet cut off from legs,
there’s nothing right about them.

And yet
this scene of legless feet
and handless fingers
wildly strewn across a field

once witnessed by a bird
and fired clear as life upon that tiny inner eye,
survives:
the bird falls down,
its eye in ruins,
even then the scene escapes decay.

Wind-scattered fingers
feet and
head:
return at last to where you started
return at last to where you started
(for only then wind-scattered fingers feet and
head will draw the curtain over death)


Kitagawa Fuyuhiko

Posted over on Poems and Poetics
Translated from the Japanese by Jerome Rothenberg