By
Phil Symes
For the last seven months I have been living
as an ALT on Oki Dougo, the largest of the Oki
Islands. I spend time at each of the six Junior
High Schools on the island, and seeing as I
do not have a car, my Board of Education routinely
books taxis to take me to and from my places
of work, the most distant of which is half an
hour's drive away.
I wrote this poem just after I had returned
to the island after a short trip home for Christmas.
Ever since I returned I had felt somehow hyper-sensitised
to the incredible natural majesty of the islands.
But an important decision was now pressing:
whether to leave Oki when my initial contract
reached its natural conclusion, or to re-contract
for another year. I remember walking out into
the snow, and being reminded of the sound which
is made as it compresses beneath one's footsteps.
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OKI
ISLANDS
19TH JANUARY 2004
Behold that tiny patch of blue,
between the clouds,
beyond the mountain: perfect,
even through the snow, which
arms the air with ragged, icy limbs,
and obfuscates, like fog upon a lens.
At times like these, a tiny part of me
is itching to recede:
inside the dusk, from whence I came,
and thereby to immerse itself
in ancient modes of reasoning,
accustomed ways of thought.
All other ambition is lost.
It withers in the face of such authority.
It shrivels from the spectacle, imprisoned by
the interlocking mesh of snow, and has
itself
become a captive: like
that distant speck of blue; which
now itself
recedes, beyond the glass,
as onward now,
relentlessly,
my taxi cab proceeds.
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