Two Poems
by Kimiko Hahn
[For White Plum]
a golden shovel after Buson
What is a ghost for
in its white
haze among the plum
trees and pear blossoms?
Grandmothers time
their arrival. What has
their hush meant to me? Who has come
to meet me and only for
me? Truthfully, I don’t believe in the
mist they convey. But the day
has come where I see to
ghost forests and weep at day break.
///
[Mistaking Birds]
a golden shovel after Kaga no Chiyo
After a joke about mistaking
her hair for birds
and realizing a need for
tears (as in “rip”), she leaves
every Fall. Her lonely
door is grateful for a
thatch of rushes in a wan winter’s
dusk. And its black moon.
Note: the translation is by Hiroaki Sato and used with his permission.
Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan
Kimiko Hahn is the author of eleven collections, most recently The Ghost Forest: new and selected poems. Her subjects range from identity to current events to science. In the new work, she continues to play with Eastern, Western and hybrid forms–and she invents new forms that pay homage to past writers. Among her honors is the 2023 Ruth Lilly Prize for Lifetime Achievement from The Poetry Foundation and she is a Chancellor at the Academy of American Poets. Hahn teaches in the MFA Program for Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College, City University of New York.