オンライン・ライティングコンテストの最優秀賞作品 Online Writing Contest 1st Prize
by CAPRIOLI Nicole
Graduate School of International Culture and Communication Studies
The poem I wrote express the emotions I recently felt while I was looking from the balcony of my apartment in Tokyo. The outbreak of the Corona virus and its consequences made me think even more deeply about human nature and how it has been changed and affected by the environment through the years. At that time, I remembered Mishima’s words written in the epilogue of the book “Sun and Steel,” and as I was thinking about that, the image of the Teshima Art Museum and the emotions I felt that day made their way into my mind. So, this poem was born.
* * *
From the balcony on the fourth floor of my apartment in Tokyo I watch a man dig a hole deep into the earth’s soul to plant slabs of concrete and grew up too tall.
I look up at the sky I see people skimming the sky atop birds of metal wings gliding gently with the wind. It reminds me of those words written by the last Japanese who grabbed a sword
“Do I, then, belong to the heavens? […] Or do I Belong, after all, to the earth?”＊
And like a spell my shell opened again, my mind had to hide, to leave space to the emptiness that was inside. No pearl was there nothing my heart could glare. Many thoughts came by back then
Where’s the place we humans should stand?
Once I felt I was between the sky we long for, and the earth, where we belong I think:
A man had married his former climbing the latter with a ring then he let humans in.
Drops begin to fall from above, touch the soil and start run slow to the architecture’s core.
And people quietly are left to stare naive and unaware. And I think: Neither sky nor earth, And if there is no “I,” Then the truth just hurts.
＊ Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel
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