With warm mid-March sun at its back,

Nature is laying infinitesimal yet determined siege

To the feet of stones with human names.

The air hums purposefully about my ears.

My feet remain unbound; I am welcome not to linger.

I am but an anomaly, a mote in the eyes of millennia.

Koko wa, kamisama ga iru no

There are spirits here,

Gods, forgotten but not gone ( Read more... )

I am a woman. I write. Like many, I baulk at being called “a writer”, as if that's a thing that I live and breathe and embody and do with every waking hour (see date of last blog entry. Ahem.) I'm actually much more comfortable being referred to as a sporadically ambulant caffeine repository ( Read more... )

There are many things that adults think they know about the sea. They are all wrong ( Read more... )

She left a note
Saying not where she was going
But where she had been
And what she had seen
And why, why she must go.

He read her note
And wept,
Tears etching age around eyes
And face, and falling
Upon paper, upon ink.

And as he wept, ink wept,
Reaching jagged spiderlegs
To paper, to fingers,
Blackness into skin,
An indelible taint.

By '87, we'd had enough of London. Its streets had turned out to be paved with just enough gold to take out a mortgage on a small house at a substantial remove from work, from where it was at, and from the kind of green fields that somewhat older children would probably want to frolic in one day if they weren't to eventually succumb to a life of ( Read more... )

You can have faith in the system. In procedure, in structure. Nature is a system, a self-regulating machine, and so it is only natural that man too should yearn to organise himself and his fellow man according to best principles. Man can have faith in the manual, in which the right way to do things is set down, unchanging before his eyes, and ( Read more... )

He is almost poetic,
Balletic,
A double-jointed twisting hymn
To an evening on the gin.

There stands a tree ( Read more... )

A cynical mood front has been gathering in my teacher brain of late. Perhaps it's because, when I ask my friends who speak good English what their strategies were for learning, they shrug their shoulders. "Study? I guess," they say. "I just kind of stuck at it."

Or perhaps it's because my dentist speaks better English from listening to BBC Radio 4 ( Read more... )

In a corner of downtown Shinjuku,
Under thatched eaves, under skyscrapers,
Between bonfires
And the hot sake in me,
I bowed, clapped, bowed,
Rang the bell,
And wished,
For once,
For nothing for myself.

For a second,
I felt a selfish pleasure
In my selflessness.

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