-the visiting american-

Today,

Japan’s Prime

Minister declared

the great and terrible

tsunami which leveled 

to splintered wood

too many homes

once made for living

too many cows

once raised for milking,

too many cows to be counted

removed or remembered

or the bobbing bald-

headed automobiles,

the drenched, craggy sweep 

of the northern landscape

once hunched and working

going about itself——

once fields of the meadow

once muscle at the pistons

of rice and machinery

of villages farmed and fished

negotiating reeds where once

upon a time its lovers clung 

on standing docks

at the branching bonsai 

shading the distance,

at the petals 

of blossoms,——  

now torn there to grieve 

the dead strewn among them,

under them, 

under the fragments left for the living,

dank as the atmosphere, to be:

“The worst disaster in the Country’s history

since World War Two.”——

and that’s where I come in.

I was barely visible,

just weaned from the curiosity 

of my own toes.

But later I remember through "News

On Parade" through the racket

of the Plaza Theater, the ornamentation

of the stately Empire Theater, where

the fierceness of the Japanese Empire

came to its end,— my Country 'tis of thee
the insurmountable

shock-wave blows Japan to smithereens

in the year of our lord.

now trembling 'neath the lights

the lifelessness in dark agony

Japan’s Prime

Minister is looking at Japan

all over again.

                                 3/12/11