THREE POEMS by Rumiko Kora, trans. Judy Halebsky & Ayako Takahashi
Alive, the wind
lifts seeds
and carries them away
spider eggs hatch and depart on the wind
over years the wind breaks down plants into soil
we are of the wind and all of our senses
the wind breathing
through us
Within the Trees, A Universe
-Sacred Forest of Kinabatangan, Malaysia
people listen to the trees speak
the trees heard the people
there is light in the woods there was darkness
both life and death
there are voices and so there was silence
within the woods a universe
within the trees a human becomes human
A Mother Speaks
After seeing the noh play, A Killing Stone, Sesshôseki
the play starts in Nasuno province
on the stage there’s a thick purple silk cloth
covering a stone that was dropped
over a field like a cracked rotten egg
a bird flies over the stone and drops
dead to the ground, any living thing, person
or animal that touches that stone dies
a village woman tells the story of this terrifying stone
it starts with her failed attempt to take the emperor’s life
which left her spirit captured within the stone
that now casts spells on the living
when the stone splits open
the village woman appears as a ghost
and the dead return hatching through the stone
pulsing with energy stronger than even the living
the woman’s blaring red rage steadies
and fades to a pale color
the stone again becomes an egg
the defeated become the victors
the lost become found the dead revive
she speaks, the years steal from us
we are robbed of our eggs and escape to the wilderness
we give birth to stone children
hold them in our arms warming the stone
abreast of the thieves who stole our eggs
her ghostly feet glide stamp the ground
a voice within the mask scolds us
echoing from another world
will you be ruled by this bearing always
Rumiko KORA (1932-2021) was a poet, translator, and critic born and raised in Tokyo. Her book The Voice of a Mask won the Contemporary Poetry Prize in 1988. She also wrote essays and novels and co-translated an anthology of poetry from Asia and Africa. She devoted herself to promoting women’s work and was instrumental in establishing the Award for Women Writers. Much of her writing focuses on identifying the struggles and contradictions of a female gender identity.
Ayako Takahashi and Judy Halebsky work collaboratively to translate poetry between English and Japanese.
Ayako TAKAHASHI is a scholar and translator teaching at University of Hyogo in Japan. Her recent scholarship includes the books Ambience: Ecopoetics in the Anthropocene (Shichosha, 2022) and Reading Gary Snyder (Shichosha 2018). She has published translations of many American poets such as Jane Hirshfield, Anne Waldman, and Joanne Kyger, among others (Anthology of Contemporary American Women Poets, Shichosha 2012).
Judy HALEBSKY is a poet. She is the author of Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged) (University of Arkansas Press, 2020) Tree Line (New Issues 2014) and Sky=Empty, winner of the New Issue Prize (New Issues, 2010). She has also published articles on cultural translation and noh theatre. She is a professor of Literature and Language and the director of the MFA program at Dominican University of California. Ayako and Judy have been working together for several years and have previously published articles in ecopoetry and English language haiku.
