Tokyo

 April 24 Word of the Day: Tokyo 

 

This time not, will never go

Neon noodles anime shops

Perfect parcels fishbowl lenses

Now overseas is out of reach.

 

Noodle neons anime stops

Behind roller doors’ double locks

Now overseas is out of reach,

The Tokyo I have never seen.

 

Beyond roller doors, double locks

Grow bamboo walls moss-bank gardens

Old Tokyo where I’ve never been,

The place you read about in books

 

Green bamboo walls moss-dank gardens

Cinder layers of firestorms

Places you only see in films,

Nonstop faces’ fluent markets.

 

Cinder layers of firestorms

We can only half imagine,

Nonstop faces, fluid markets

Not now, all grounded.

 

We can only half imagine.

Microcircuits scroll up and down.

Not now, all grounded,

Only us at home like thousands.

 

Microcircuits must do instead

This time, now we’ll never go,

Only online pictures thousands

Perfect parcels fishbowl lenses.

 

[August 2020 & April 2026]

 

Image: Sake tributes in Tokyo, by B. Harvey 2025. In online poetry group during lockdown, as an exercise I invited members to write a poem about a city that they currently could not visit: “The poem can go anywhere. It can be descriptive. Memories may fill the poem. Longing to return is possibly at work. By imagining the city then and now and even in the future, you play with one of poetry’s strongest devices, which is tense. The reader is left with a strong sense of the city.” I chose the pantoum and wrote three poems for the group (Florence, Jerusalem, Tokyo) in August 2020, which are released here, with little alteration, in April 2026.