Kamakura

I don’t recall when I first understood why you stiffen at the roar of low flying jets— Did you tell me, Mother, or did I just know? When you refused to show me the caves like eyes in the hills behind Bah-chan’s house— Did I only dream it, how when the sirens began the trains stopped dead in their tracks, unleashing a stream of thousands to rush blind and headlong toward those sheltering hills— The damp press of strange bodies in darkness rank with the stench of war’s leavings, only imagine a young girl’s cries drowned in the tumult, urgent groping of unseen hands— the bombs raining d0wn on Yokohama Harbor all through the night, hothouse blooms crackling in a seething sky, then hissing into a boiling sea— Was it a millennium that passed before the sirens ceased their wailing, only to be taken up again by the dogs and the dying? But you talk of none of this today. We walk slowly, saying little, as if less said will keep the heat at bay. The air is wet, heavy with summer smells carried aloft on the hypnotic drone of cicadas. You show me where as a girl you played in other summers, catching kabuto beetles and dragonflies in bamboo cages. What must go through you when we pass them at a distance, those black maws yawning out of the hillside, exhaling the unspeakable?