'I Am Japan' by Richard Oxenham
Posted by sregan | Filed under poetry
'I Am Japan'
A Prose Poem
"I am Japan."
Those were his last words and they linger in my ears.
He died in the shade, beyond the mosquito net, sitting rigidly on his splintered wicker chair. The blue veins and pink wrinkles across the back of his hands whitened and his fingers closed like wilting petals.
I can hear his deep voice when I lie in the dark, and I stir to the faint aroma of his warm breath, hinting of sake drenched nights.
He has been immortalised on film, shot with my own camera, my own hands, as if his hands now clasp my throat, rough palmed and rigid fingered from the corn fields. What I recorded isn't a reflection of the man, but it holds his image, lingering in the lens, intangible and otherworldly.
He is a ghost. He haunts his harvested fields and the labyrinthine streets of Shinjuku. I see his face in train windows, spread across massive advertisement boards; his features form bruised clouds and his will rides tattooed lightning.
He is Japan and I never want to return.
- Richard Oxenham
