The Temples of Kamakura

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Tokei-ji

Rakesh pays 300 yen to enter Tokei-ji temple.
Outside, cicadas sing furiously
and I linger, haunted
by a magenta-spotted white lily
with dark red anthers.

The breeze is cooling
in this otherwise bug-hot day.

Three girls speaking French
watch me write this, lose interest,
wander off with their parents.
One has a pierced nose.

Through the leaves of a bush
with tiny clusters of pale lavender flowers,
a large wasp,
striped black and orange-yellow,
prowls like some aerial tiger.

A helicopter sounds in the distance, then fades.

Rakesh emerges. "It was just a room
with some old scrolls."

At the end of the garden path
a Buddha sits,
one hand upraised. 

Tokei-ji, Kamakura
August 10, 1997

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Bug Hot

It's hot and humid in Kamakura;
mushi-atsui they call it, "steaming hot".
But when I first heard that phrase,
I thought of the mushi that means insect:
bug hot, insect weather. And indeed today
the cicadas are out in force, trilling
their urgent cries of love and loneliness.
After ripening in the ground for years,
they have only a few days to mate,
or not. Either way, they end up
as spent husks, littering the paving stones
in the cemetery above the temple.
Intact, still beautiful, their wings
are whole and clean, but will never fly again.

A loud buzzing nearby: I turn,
but the sound echoes strangely off the gravestones,
and I cannot find its source.
Will a potential mate face the same problem?
They don't have long ... this heat,
their desperate heat,
cannot last. 

Engaku-ji, Kamakura
August 10, 1997

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The Riddle of the Lotus
(questions for Buddha)

The thousand-petaled flower, pure, inviolate -
was it already there when you arrived?
Were scowling guardians waiting at the gate
to keep its long virginity untried?

How did you pass, and step into the center?
Was it by strength or speed or magic spell?
Or did you simply speak with them and enter
the circle where the sacred lotus dwelled?

These thoughts are all incredible. But then,
it's still more unbelievable that when
you merely chose a spot to sit and breathe, you

generated gods to guard you there
and form a fierce blockade surrounding where
the white and shining blossom grew beneath you. 

Hasedera, Kamakura
November 22, 1998

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Copyright ©1997,1998,2003,2020 Howard A. Landman