June 2, 2012
At a Café in Tokyo
It’s been a year
since the disaster in March,
uncovering what
I’ve been, what I’ve had
or haven’t.
Still don’t know what to do
or choose—
even lunch time,
I bury my empty face
in the menu
written in both
Japanese and English.
As if nothing happened,
nothing came from Fukushima—
I have a cup of coffee, milk sinking
into my black.
People come and go
in a framework
of cloudy glasses,
invisible ashes go with the wind
settling on someone’s
shoulders
spraying someone’s
face—
Maybe the face of a California roll
is more lively,
with fresh cucumber, crab meat, avocado wrapped
in cooked rice.
I am wavering on this wavered island
without gripping an axis
of history.
A Japanese oldster said,
after WWII,
bread and milk
with eating irons
arrived in compulsory
education.
For nine years,
schools have fed them
to kids
for lunch time
instead of rice and miso-soup.
Recollecting childhood,
my grandma, a native of Fukushima,
worried about me dropping
cooked rice
from a pair of chopsticks.
The more I was forced,
the more the meal receded
from my will.
She asked me, “Why
doesn’t your teacher teach how to use them?”
I couldn’t say to her
we were comfortable
with silver tools.
In the modern world,
we Japanese became successful
and powerful
as we began to stab meat
with a fork,
cut it with a knife.
I believed
we healed the scars
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
with good mechanical skills
proud of made in Japan.
Here at the Tokyo café,
my iPhone shows workers covering white clothes with masks
in the uncovered Fukushima,
displaying my own powerlessness.
Maybe I’ve been dropping something important
from a pair of chopsticks.
I feel a hole
in history, of ignorance
inside me—
From the kitchen,
I smell a doughnut with a hole in it
bubbling, floating on oil.
~
Katsue Suzuki is living in Tokyo, Japan. Her poetry has appeared in The Laurel Review, New Orleans Review, Southern Poetry Review, and others.