Look at this, it's my bone,
a tip of bone torn from its flesh,
filthy, filled up with woes,
it's the days of our lives
sticking out, a blunt bone
bleached by the rain.
There's no shine to it,
innocent, stupidly white,
absorbing the rain,
blown back by the wind,
just barely
reflecting the sky.
Funny imagining, seeing
this bone on a chair
in a restaurant
packed to the gills, & eating
mitsuba leafy & boiled,
a bone but alive.
Look at this, it's my bone,
& is that me staring
& wondering: Strange,
was my soul left behind
& has it come back
where its bone is,
daring to look?
On the half dead grass
on the bank of a brook
in my home town, standing
& looking - who's there?
Is it me? A bone
sticking out
a bone stupidly white
& high as a billboard.
YOU ARE READING
the poems of Nakahara Chūya
PoetryBorn in 1907, Nakahara Chuya was one of the most gifted and colourful of Japan's early modern poets. A bohemian romantic, his death at the early age of thirty, coupled with the delicacy of his imagery, have led to him being compared to the greatest...
