The Pond

Poems from Tokyo's Ueno Park and its temple complex, Ground Zero for the Fire Bombing of Tokyo by the US Army Air Forces in March of 1945. The toll of the dead reached 100,000, outnumbering the immediate tolls of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The pond itself, Shobazu Pond, survived, as it has survived all other local events since the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age. The poem that remembers the bombing is called "In the Season when the Dead Return." It doesn't mention the catastrophe itself. Of course not. It's a poem. The book ends with a coda mocking official Japanese attitudes toward the Fukushima tsunami and attendant nuclear disaster. The poem is called "The Wisdom of Monju" and Youtube has a video of my reading it at Infinity Books in Asakusa.