Sagawa Chika's Poems

Sagawa Chika

    Black air
    In the distance, dusk cuts the tongue of the sun.
    Underwater, town after town in the sky stops laughing.
    All shadows drop from the trees and gang up on me. Forests and windowpanes go pale, like women. Night has spread completely. The carpool takes a flame aboard and crosses the park.

    At that point my emotions dance about the city
    Until they have driven out the grief.


    To the vast blooming sky

    They are the eyes of all people.
    Don’t these words resonate in white.
    I’ll take off my hat and throw it all in.
    As the sky and oceans hide countless flower petals.
    One of these days, blue fish and rose-colored birds will burst through my head.
    The things I’ve lost are never to return.
    Flower

    Dreams are severed fruit
    Auburn pears have fallen in the field
    Parsley blooms on the plate
    The leghorn at times seems to have six fingers
    I crack the egg and the moon comes out

    Green flame

    I first see men loudly approaching down numerous green stairs pass by look away cram into a small space while gradually hardening into a mound their movement makes waves of light furrow through the wheat field a thick overflowing fluid makes it impossible to stir the woodlands larch with short hair snail painting carefully spider walking its line like fog everything rotates from green to deeper green the men are inside the milk bottle on the kitchen table are reflected crouching with their flattened faces slide around an apple they seem to crumble as they block off a shaft of light in the street a blind girl plays by ducking under the shadows of the sun’s rings.

    I hurry to shut the window danger has reached me a fire blazes outside the beautiful green flames spread high, circling the outskirts of the earth and in the end dwindle, disappear as a single thin line of the horizon

    My weight leaves me takes me back to the depths of oblivion people are crazy here no point in sorrow nor in speaking their eyes dyed green believing is uncertain and looking makes me rage

    Who blindfolds me from behind? Shove me into sleep.


    Translated by: Sawako Nakayasu

    

Sagawa Chika - Sagawa Chika (real name Aiko Kawasaki), is arguably Japan’s first female Modernist poet, Sagawa was a member of the lively community surrounding Kitasono Katue and was highly esteemed by her contemporaries. Stomach cancer took her life at the age of 25, at which point her poems were collected and edited by Ito Sei and published (Sagawa Chika Shishuu (Collected Poems of Sagawa Chika), Shourinsha, 1936). Later a more complete collected works, including her prose, in memoriam writings from poets, and a complete bibliography, was published as Sagawa Chika Zenshishuu (Collected Works of Sagawa Chika) by Shinkaisha in 1983. In 2010, her Collected Poems was republished by Shinkaisha, who also in 2011 published a new book collecting Sagawa’s translations from English-language poetry, including poems by Charles Reznikoff, James Joyce, and Mina Loy
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