TRAVEL POEM

 

 

Apart from a few days stopover in Tokyo, I’ve never explored Japan, except in my imagination. For over a century, opera lovers have been transported to Japan through the story of “Madame Butterfly’, composed by an Italian, Giacomo Puccini, who also never saw Japan.

 

I’ve always been moved by the poignancy of the opera’s tragic love story. In this poem I reimagine the opera’s central character, beautiful Cio-Cio-San, not in the original setting of bustling Nagasaki, but in the peaceful, Japanese countryside.

 

Mark Wakely is an Australian journalist, non-fiction writer and poet. His last two books were Sweet Sorrow about death and dying, and Dream Home, exploring the notion of home in the human imagination.

 

 

 

 

 

Madame Butterfly & Me

 

 

 

Cio-Cio-San,

you know how it ends:

your sailor weds another,

they take your child,

you take your life.

Let me write you a new story,

because my only love

has left me too.

 

 

Let’s begin at a garden bridge,

where Tiger Lilies grow,

careless of our fate.

Although betrayed, trust me.

Take the path I make for you.

I’ll stand beneath the willow,

while you bend and bathe

in a river that flows from above.

Wash the white rice powder 

from your face.

Wash away the yesterdays

from your soul.

 

 

On the hill there is a house,

dark cedar and deep eaves.

There’s fragrant tea to be drunk,

as bamboo creaks in the wind;

ancient poems to be read

as geckos sing in the rain;

and lanterns to be lit,

as night blots the sky.

 

 

Let us look at each other

not in diminished light,

but in the bright blaze of

the burning need to love.

Light no incense tonight,

the air is redolent with blossom

and the scent of your still-wet skin.

 

 

With these, my trembling hands,

open your kimono of indigo silk

and golden-threaded dragonflies.

In the final moment of our poem,

Let us forget, all that has gone before.