zebrakof

I write poetry in Japanese, translate to English, and compose music.

[zebrakof]

Sister and Brother

Cargo boats

pass back and forth

on the river behind our house.

The empty lot where,

just last year,

we picked wild greens

and ran around playing,

now has stacks of materials

piled up there.

Factories,

small workshops,

workers’ lodgings—

more and more of them

around the neighborhood.

With more people around,

more customers started coming in,

and our shop

looks busy these days.

The grown-ups always say

how hard things were after the earthquake.

I was still too small

to really understand

what was happening,

and all I remember

is people coming and going,

one after another,

taking care of me,

doting on me,

being kind to me.

That’s all I remember,

so I think

I’m glad

I was a child back then.

After school,

taking care of my little brother

became routine.

I tied him to my back,

rocked him to sleep,

did my homework like that,

sometimes went out to play nearby

just the same.

When I shared my snack,

he cried for more.

I’d make him chew on a cloth.

But he was so cute,

I’d give in

anyway.

I blew dandelion fluff,

and he laughed.

If we could just get through

the evening hours,

things would somehow work out.

The radio played at the shop entrance,

and the laughter of the men

echoed on.

[zebrakof]

Concrete

That day,

I couldn’t keep up with

my classmates’ dangerous games,

so I was sitting against the wall

in the shade of the school building,

and watched the clouds, thinking.

This ground is floating in space,

remembering the globe

our science teacher had brought in.

This ground is floating too,

like those clouds.

What if, just like that island in the sky

I saw on TV the other day,

I could leap from the shadow of the school

and dive toward those clouds?

What if, from now on,

everyone had to live carefully

so they wouldn’t fall into the sky—

and I, too, together with them,

could look up at the ground from the sky.

Then I felt I really was falling into the sky

and I got scared.

Leaning against the concrete wall,

I was thinking my thoughts were far more extreme

than the games my classmates played.

What if those classmates playing on the field,

and the people walking down the street,

all fell off this ground,

crashing into those hard clouds,

while vanishing into the blue beyond

through the gaps between them,

dying ridiculously easily?

What if countless people,

with no chance to resist,

were to die ridiculously easily?

What if, in that way,

gravity kept working upside down,

and countless people vanished or perished,

with no one able to rescue them,

no one even able to search for them?

And if it did,

the night sky through the window

would surely be more terrifying

than the midnight sea

seen from a seawall.

I was thinking that,

leaning against the school wall.

[zebrakof]

Balance

A teacher once told me

“You seek too much balance

Lean more

to the right or left

up or down”

But someone who never takes

what people say at face value

tries to pursue the exact center

only to drill a hole through it

and slip out the other side

Someone once said

they wished they could spend their days

doing nothing but looking at the sky

So I pressed my face to the bus window

to see what that felt like

But whether it was clouds

the sharp corner of a building

or the leaves at the tips of roadside trees—

I couldn’t help thinking

Sometimes I suddenly think

“I wanna die”“Just die”

“Let it all just end”

These crude reflexive feelings

toward negative thoughts

just never disappear

I wonder if others feel the same

Maybe in countless strangers’ fantasies

I’m being killed off casually

over and over again—

and somehow

that thought makes me laugh

Hah

I’m always feeling bothered

by all the little things in everyday life

The cost of sustaining a body

how enormous it is

And yet they say humanity rose

to rule this planet

by cutting down the time it spends eating

Ah—

so that’s what that person meant

that at least

I’m allowed to keep thinking

Failures pile up

and I’m no longer sure where I am

I keep wandering

along the edge of endless chaos

Right or left, High or low,

Forward or back, Inside or out,

Child or adult, Macro or micro,

Egg or chicken, Violence or order

Past and future, White and black,

Life or death—

still searching

Since the moment I was born

I have been inside myself

At the edge of the world

in a corner of the town

in this dark small room

inside this finite being

this is the center of the universe

[zebrakof]

small mind

I watched news about the war

it pains my heart

but I can’t help feeling

it’s unrelated to me

Caught up in daily life

that I don’t feel like doing anything

for someone who’s not right in front of me

I am a narrow-minded person

Better to know a bit than nothing at all,

I’m feeling satisfied

over something as small

as moving forward by just one millimeter.

They say the universe is expanding

at 67.4 kilometers per second per megaparsec.

I wonder sometimes

what’s my birth’s worth?

By working as a cog in society,

did I delay the end of this Earth

by about one second?

But the other day,

you listened to my tune,

and you loved my song.

In this vast universe,

though life is brief,

even if our lives are just one grain

in an endless dune.

But I want to believe

it had at least one gram of meaning.

No matter how tiny it was.

No matter how tiny it was…