Shuri Kido

Translated from the Japanese by Tomoyuki Endo and Forrest Gander
A long slope.
The strong sun dipped, and finally sank.
No matter how long I walked, I stayed in "the middle of the road."
The name torn into pieces.
Just keeping on, climbing higher and higher,
I'd completely forgotten the name.
The west wind shifts the typhoon's course,
the world, for a few hours, is thrown into confusion.
You might name one thing after another,
but each loses its name in that same moment.
Into what we call "nature."
I stood in the middle of nature.
And something was missing, the natural was
draped in a thin shroud.
Vowels scattered,
the name went missing.
When once more the name "nature" was applied
to the desolate-as-ever landscape,
immediately, the name began to weather away.
What is still losing its name,
and what has already lost its name,
those two strands entwine
around the true name.
Those who have wings stay put,
howling out their condition over and over,
"How fragile we are!"
though no one hears them.
Thousands of ripples tell
a story of benthic anguish.
The ripples beach themselves
on the name of each anguish,
vowels scatter by the thousands
over the earth.
from the journal HARVARD REVIEW
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We might think there’s a secret dialogue between “A Thousand Vowels” and George Oppen’s “Psalm,” a poem about an encounter with deer that ends:
 
Their paths
Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them
Hang in the distances
Of sun

The small nouns
Crying faith
In this in which the wild deer
Startle, and stare out.
 
Oppen & Kido are both exploring the way that experience is negotiated through language.
 
Color photograph of interior of Zitouna TV
Anti-Dictator Poem Shuts Down Zitouna TV

Tunisian television host Amer Ayad read out "The Ruler" by Iraqi poet Ahmed Matar on air, which led to his arrest and a raid on the station. "His detention is the latest in a series of arrests that have targeted journalists and lawmakers who had expressed their opposition to the president's measures."

via BBC
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