Pomfret Pillars (For Chennai) – Krishna Sharma

 

It is a Holi day:

Powdered clouds of purple

Stain a sky, drier than

The melange of rivers we found

 

Flushed out in an Indian sun.

There is a lady we

Affectionately call ‘aunty’,

Selling her piles

 

Of Pomfret at every boiled street end,

Her son, aimlessly stacking them

Higher than a sacred peak.

Their brutal fall

 

Into vestigial puddles

Effaces them.

He is a child of the land:

Ascending green, white and orange.

 

Bending back,

He unreels uninterested seconds,

Seeping away with

Coloured clouds…

 

 

Krishna Sharma is a teenage poet, whose works have appeared in publications such as ‘Hebe’ and ‘BUSTA RHYME: North West Voices. He was a commended winner in the 2017 Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award. Apart from reading whatever he can get his hands on, Krishna volunteers at his local library, swims, plays tennis and sometimes over-watches his favourite television shows. He hopes to study English at degree level.

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September 18, 2017July 13, 2020 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: clouds, colours, creative, creativity, culture, fall, family, festival, fish, Holi, India, Krishna Sharma, peak, poem, Poetry, rivers, sky, streets, sun, time, tradition, world, writing 1 Comment

Higashi-Koenji 東高円寺 – Anne Louise Avery

 

*Higashi-Koenji is situated in Tokyo’s Suginami ward and is famous as a center of alternative youth culture and for its temples and shrines.

 

The summer my father died

I moved to Higashi Koenji.

The house had new tatami floors

And a fat white cat called Setsuke.

It smelled of cedar wood and mayonnaise. 

It was also

By a video store,

The best in Tokyo

(with every X-Files episode

And sun-faded posters of Peter Sellers).

A lantern carver lived next door.

His mother left me peaches on our stoop

Coated with a thin dusting of mica.

One day, I walked to the station

At six fifteen am to catch a train to Mitaka-shi.

It was my father’s birthday,

The Seventh of July,

And overnight the station people had covered the entrance

With silver stars and 

Long streamers like tentacles 

(Watermelon pink! Slush blue! Frog green!)

For the Tanabata Matsuri, 

The Star Festival,

When the Weaver-girl and the Cow-herd

Meet on a bridge across the Milky Way

Made of magpie wings.

In the evening, I eat grilled eel and

Strawberry cheese cake and

Scratch a wish with marker pen on a thin strip of tanzaku paper. 

And I tie it next to all the other wishes

Bristling on a bamboo branch in Koenji temple.

 

Anne Louise Avery is a writer, art historian and the cartography editor at the travel journal, Panorama (http://panoramajournal.org). Her recent book, Albion’s Glorious Ile, published by Unicorn Press, was featured in the Guardian and on Radio 4. She is also the director of the acclaimed arts education charity, Flash of Splendour. Follow her on Twitter @annelouiseavery and @petitflash.

August 28, 2017August 28, 2017 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: Anne Louise Avery, change, colours, creative, creativity, family, festival, home, Japan, memory, nature, past, poem, Poetry, senses, stars, summer, Tokyo, tradition, train, travel, wish, writing Leave a comment