Mirror
The attraction is not
unexpected. We see
what is placed
before us, not
what may be.
The mirror is empty
until approached.
* * *
One of six short poems included in my micro-chapbook, You Break What Falls. Available for free download here: http://www.origamipoems.com/poets/236-robert-okaji
“Mirror” first appeared here in May 2015.
Moths
Small moths stir
in the darkness.
I feel their
wings brush my
face, my hands,
remembering the cry
of something unseen.
It is windy
again this morning.
* * *
“Moths” first appeared here in July 2015.
Emptying Haibun
Waiting, I open myself but nothing enters. Even music’s comfort avoids me, preferring calmer ports or perhaps another’s wind choices. I drop the weighted cord through the flute, pull it, and watch the cloth ease out. Some days pain drags behind me no matter what words emerge, what phrases follow. Last night brought the season’s first fireflies. This wall of books grows taller each day.
exhaling, I note
smudges in the sky —
oh, dirty window
This first appeared in 1988, in Aileron. At the time I was experimenting with movement and breath and line, and wrote quite a few of these meditations in this form, some more successful than others.
* * *
where breath begins
it ends consider
light its secret
structure the sense
of limit defined
if a hand
recalls what the
eye cannot which
is the source
of remembrance one
touches more deeply
or allows itself
to be touched
a difference only
in the approach
Self-Portrait as Wave
Feeling limited, I succumb to surge,
disperse, reassemble, return
in the calming swirl. Nothing
resembles me. I relinquish this piece,
retain that, and reinforced,
reside in the whorl, swollen,
winnowed to a point and capped,
roar and rumble, shredded,
whole yet apart, a solitary
fist crashing through another
watery torso in response, in
resonance, again, again.
“Self-Portrait as Wave” was first published in the inaugural issue of Kissing Dynamite. Many thanks to editor Christine Taylor for taking this piece.
I’m delighted to report that I’ve been named the winner of the 2021 Etchings Press Poetry prize! The publication date for My Mother’s Ghost Scrubs the Floor at 2 a.m. is May 5. Etchings Press, a student-run publisher at University of Indianapolis, is offering copies for $10.00.
Many thanks to the Etchings Press staff, and to The Indianapolis Review editor Natalie Solmer for publishing the title poem in fall 2019, and subsequently nominating it for a Pushcart Prize. My new home, Indianapolis, has been very kind to me!
.
Self-Portrait as Circle
Ever-bounded, I express myself in
limitation, in one-dimensional
anxiety looped around the blank
self which is not me; unfilled,
or forever open, intuiting the history
of resemblance in tree stumps,
in concentric pond ripples and
entrance wounds at the instant
of penetration. Or, closed, as
barrier to all extending beyond
my linear border, I accept this
trait, knowing that even as I
surround this empty field, the
center is never mine to hold.
* * *
“Self-Portrait as Circle” first appeared in ISACOUSTIC in October 2019. Many thanks to editor Barton Smock for his tireless efforts to promote poetry and poets.
Hail
My hands know the sadness of rock,
of unfinished lines and rough
sides tapering to sharpness.
The shape of solitude, turning.
Now the stones fall as water,
a woman lets down her hair
and laughter chokes through silence.
Into this dream I ascend.
“Hail” first appeared here in September 2016, and is included in Indra’s Net: An International Anthology of Poetry in Aid of The Book Bus.
All profits from this anthology published by Bennison Books will go to The Book Bus, a charity which aims to improve child literacy rates in Africa, Asia and South America by providing children with books and the inspiration to read them.
Available at Amazon (UK) and Amazon (US)
The Bitter Celebrates
Mention gateways and mythologies
and I see openings to paths
better left unseen. No choice is
choice,
but preparation leads us astray as well.
Take this bitter leaf.
Call it arugula.
Call it rocket.
Call it colewort or weed.
Dress it with oil and vinegar,
with garlic and lemon.
Add tomato, salt.
Though you try to conceal it,
the bitterness remains.
But back to gates and myths. Do they truly
lead us out, or do we
circle back, returning
to the same endings
again
and again.
Remove the snake, rodents return.
Seal the hole.
Take this leaf.
Voice those words.
Close that door.
“The Bitter Celebrates” first appeared in Amethyst Review in December 2018.
Apricot Wood
I built a frame of apricot
wood. This was for you. The clouds float
through it even as I sleep. You wrote
once of wild herbs gathered and brought
to a lovely girl, an offering not
of passion but of some remote
desire to hear a word from the throat
of the Lord Within Clouds. I thought
of this as I chiseled the wood.
Last night it rained. I listened to
it from my bed by the open
window, hoping that the clouds would
not leave. This morning two birds flew
by. It is raining again.
Originally penned in the 1980s, “Apricot Wood,” is included in my 2015 chapbook, If Your Matter Could Reform. It was first published in 1986, in SPSM&H, a publication devoted to sonnets, and was featured on Autumn Sky Poetry Daily in March 2015. It’s interesting to look at my writing from this period. Some pieces seem to have been written by a stranger, long ago and far, far away. This one somehow seems closer.
O at the Edges 