Rexroth, 100 Poems from the Japanese
BY MARTHINE SATRIS.
High winter moon on the plum blossoms --
we watched it rise over the ridge and the tide rippled out
carving cliffs in the sandbanks
The weight of my child
my back to the westerlies his shield
as cold and sand blew
We nearly left his yellow shovel, root of such anguish
when a friend pawed it earlier,
forgotten as we watched fish hawk surfer swimmer seal and gulls
He tells me, This is my new shovel,
my old one was blue. I lost it when
I was playing with Big Papa and the ocean just took it.
I tried to run after it, but it got too deep.
A memory half his lifetime old.
This same stretch of channel, this same sanding wind --
last spring I sat watching my father and son chase and play,
baby sleeping, arms flung up, rainbow umbrella propped and weighted.
Today with friends who’ve known Januaries here
we tandem that we've never seen the beach like this,
the dips and channels, the stacks of sand,
the deep, soft entrance to the water.
The book of translations still shelved in its place
as tides heave the moon’s revolving weight and I
reach back for it, remembrance falling open.
You would have made a haiku on this moon, let me try again:
Winter moon, high and shining on plum blossoms
casts night shadows
Orion and Cassiopeia moving always, slowly.
Marthine Satris grew up in West Marin and lives in Oakland with her family. Her writing has been published in Wild Roof Journal, Filter Feeder: Nature Loved and Lost, Flyway Journal, Zyzzyva, The San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. She is the associate publisher at Heyday, an independent book publisher based in Berkeley, CA, and contributes regularly to the Oakland Review of Books. You can find her on Instagram @m_satris.