Toshifumi Sugai/Japan

Anemones

Anemones I want to depict.

Anemones I cannot depict.

Anemones bloom in my heart.

Anemones are unseen.

Anemones are vague.

Anemones have disappeared.

Anemones I want to embrace.

Anemones I want to keep.

Haruko Hirano/Japan

Walk beyond the farthest mountain

I walk slowly holding a small thing,

Watching ears of pampas grasses waving,

A tiny butterfly dancing around leopard plants,

Whiskers of polygonum sparkling in the morning light.

Look, here

Is where you lay,

Eating your time,

Belly on the ground,

Listening to the words of earth,

Not sleeping,

Just pretending to sleep.

Riyoko Hara/Japan

Peace is ...

Two elder girls were picking flowers 

On the paths in a large rice field.

One girl had pink flowers,

The other had yellow ones.

The rice field was so large,

But there seemed to be no flowers,

I looked around but could not find any.

Far away were seen a row of mountains.

And this rice field was like a fantasy world.

I tried hard to find flowers in vain.

Gyo Takano/Japan

fledglings

below the precipice sprawls despair, and at the precarity of peering in 

they hold the mournful meaning, send a glance, the corpse’s froth meanly menacing

a directly descending beak, overbearing

into the bottomless darkness, it cut across my field of vision

dragged forth by the hair, my disappointment becomes known

both legs thrust out, the electronic sound rings endlessly

if i start walking, the compass of my self-restraint runs wild

you, listening to the treble tones of birds at the harbor

Turfalko/Morocco

Indomitable silences

Indomitable

silences

dream

embossed

consciousness

ascending

close

to the adobe temple

NIJO Cenka/Japan

Inome

There’s a boar 

trapped in my left chest.

Its eyes shine through the slits between my ribs, 

and sometimes it tramples my diaphragm 

with its hard hooves.

I’d love to let it run free, 

but if it charges out blindly and hurts someone...

that’s the last thing I want.

So I keep it here, caged but still breathing.

Annie Tilby/UK

Let’s talk Tapestry

 

But

don’t expect anything too literal –

neither restoration nor reconstruction

I use vocabulary to maintain a link.

I want to play –

to evoke not describe,

nor illustrate

Megumi Watanabe/Japan

Quiet

 

A winter shrouded in a years‐long gap of jet‐black heaviness

On slightly withered evergreens and

On completely bare deciduous trees

A light snow falls equally

A light snow melts

Like the purity of the dripping droplets

A trace of weariness resided in an earnest face

There was a time of reconciliation

Ahn Sang-hak/Republic of Korea

That Person Came Back but I Was Not There 

I should have waited for that person then.

As a roe deer glances back when it crosses a hill,

just for a moment I should have stood and waited there,

if it were night I should have waited for dawn.

if it were winter, I should have waited for spring.

Like a bear waiting for a salmon.

Sin Hyeon-rim/Republic of Korea

A Man Who Forgot how to Love

Not earning tomorrow‘s rice, the price of rice rose like bubbles.

News of suicide bombers piled up like tax bills.

Not knowing the laundry shop, people stricken by poverty who committed suicide easily disappeared.

With so much forgetting, we forget history, forget how to kiss,

forget how to love, become workholics.

A man who forgot how to love passed by a woman who had forgotten sex.