The pinks and whites of azaleas

lie in the imagined future, the when

where children’s play will reverberate

while lovers discreetly hold hands.

 

In this when is a place of women only,

the only sound speechless falling snow

as it erases all other colors, replaces

a lover’s hand with an umbrella shaft.

 

There are no men to warm the night,

to quicken children not to be born.

The year could be any, to come or recall,

the season another dark winter of war.

 

(after the painting, “Nezu Shrine,” by Tsuchiya Koitsu)