Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Studies of the foetus in the womb’

Once we were like that.
 
Once we were folded
in on ourselves
thumb to eyelid, toes to thigh
 
life humming to us
through its soft powerful rope.
 
Later we straightened out,
taught all our parts their places
 
only going back
in grief or in dreams —
 
as my great-grandfather dies
in his village in Japan
 
his daughter running from her bath
but missing the moment, his wife
 
lifting his knees to his chest
after shaving him for the last time.
 

Dorothy Yamamoto

in collection Honshū Bees, 2018, Templar Poetry,
ISBN 978-1-9111323-8-7

 
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Hares at Dublin Airport

I read somewhere
that there are hares living in airports
 
so fragile beneath
the greedy roar of the jet engines
 
but free from predators
sometimes even racing the planes.
 
So, when my flight dips over Dublin
I start searching for hares
 
for bodies pressed to scruffy grass
fur ruffled in the blast
 
for those thistledown selves
that cling to the edges
 
without passage, without right-of-way…
 
They stay invisible.
 

Dorothy Yamamoto

in collection Honshū Bees, 2018, Templar Poetry,
ISBN 978-1-9111323-8-7

 
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Laika at 60

She is very old now, and spends most of the day
curled in her basket.
The others come to visit her —
Belka and Strelka,
Lisa and Ryzhik,
Bolik, who ran away, and his stand-in,
‘Substitute for Missing Bolik’.
 
The hairs round her nose are white —
where the scientist kissed her
before he closed the hatch.
She’s forgotten that kiss,
as she’s forgotten the voices
that spoke of discovery, of mission,
of the need for sacrifice.
 
What she remembers
are the Moscow streets, their brilliant smells
of snow and rain and piss,
scraps of meat gnawed from a bone,
every day the thrill
of still being alive.
 
But she’s not afraid of death.
She will choose her own time,
get up, walk stiffly out
under the arch of night
feel the wind ruffling her fur
breathe in the stars.
 

Dorothy Yamamoto

published in South, Issue 65, 2022

 
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The wind telephone

There are no signs, no maps, no guides
to lead you to the wind telephone
 
sitting below Whale Mountain — Kujira-yama —
in a perfectly ordinary garden.
 
It’s a black phone, unconnected
with one of those old coiled cords —
 
you lift it, and into its cup
you speak your message to the dead.
 
Do the dead reply? Breath in the wind
surely leaves a trace, air through air
 
differing because it has held speech.
I see myself pick up the phone
 
and hold it close, to catch my father’s
smoky syllables
 
those gaps while he pauses
to light his cigarette,
searching for the right word.
 
 
(‘The Phone of the Wind’ was created by Itaru Sasaki in 2010 in his garden in north-east Japan. It’s now visited by thousands of people every year.)
 

Dorothy Yamamoto

published in South, Issue 70, 2024

 
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