Tachikawa Dismantled
By Brenda Yates
Showa Kinen Park, formerly Tachikawa Air Force Base, was a U.S.A. military
installation until returned to the Japanese in the late 1970's. – news item
no one is lonely
when spring begins entering
bodies and flowers
helplessly hopeful
if only for a moment
in the grip of yes
breaking into bloom
yes yes loud as cicadas
becoming all voice
*
even Bashō who
said he'd write no death poem
found his in a dream
while near to dying
(withered as winter grasses,
worn, but not yet spent),
and there discovered
dreams will go wandering still
over dried out fields
*
At Tachikawa,
flowers, ponds and butterflies
summer grass so green
where once, cargo planes
taxied and took off or crews
on standby scrambled
bombers and fighters
that waited on the tarmac,
where jets roared and boomed
while a girl walking
along the perimeter
of American
stopped beside the fence
to pick wildflowers that grew
unregulated
in spaces between
the chain-link barbed wire along
Japan's narrow roads.
Lost in her own world
she's still on her way to school
when warning bells ring,
so late, she leaves thoughts
behind and quickens her steps.
No more that time, that
place nor even that
girl, yet all these wandering
dreams stronger than death.
Brenda Yates is a Pushcart nominee and author of Bodily Knowledge (2015). She's a Patricia Bibby and Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Poetry Prize winner and a Robinson Jeffers Tor House finalist.
