Unga Bamboo Grove

An infinity of light,

sun coming green

through the vertical blind:

a stand of spears rises like a temple,

the shafts struck deep in ancestral hearts.

Within the trees,

behind a rusted wide-runged fence

grey crooked gravestones

stick up like blackened teeth

from the darker lips of soil.

The glade thickens with birds,

of many kinds all loud and invisible.

They shift noisily unseen,

speaking in tongues that tell the tales of the dead

in the shaded complex geometry of bamboo.

                                                Japan, 10/94