Tokyo Bay

“How great your wonders and your plans for us…more than I can count… for innumerable troubles have crowded upon me.”

I am not ready to believe that the screaming metallic with bright, glaring, senseless eyes,
Pounding down the hardened tar on burning feet..
I am not willing to believe that the steel and glass that hangs in the night
With puny pride beneath the masked stars,
And in the luminescent slow burning that steals that night sky
That pretends a purpose of holding back the desperate man it created….
I am not wanting to believe that the red tails that do not wag
But endlessly chase each other
Carrying the produce to feed the monster of twisted copper tentacles
Jumbled concrete and rearranged mass…

Even as the hurdling cross-stream disappears down the gapping mouth,
Anxiously churning beneath the calm and wrinkling peaceful Bay
To excrete on the other side
While on the other side of this side I see the discharge in Babel
(For it is not what goes in a man or monster that defines it, but what comes out)

While
I do feel the commanding shaking that wakes in the night, by the cold hand,
With a swaying from side to side ,
I do hear the slow building rumble of something huge and inevitable coming closer
And threatening on one swing to push over the edge
Sliding into the fire and water down the long chasm of the bottomless depth..

That
I am not better here looking sleeplessly down on it all;
Down on the poor, poor huddled mass, most in a moment of rest
Waiting to die as they did last by our own hand,

I cannot believe we are better than when the trees, quiet and cool,
Owned it all to the edge of the water and sand
And we could, together, without crossing death, walk along the beach.