My Poetry in Life and Legends
My poetry is in great company here in LIFE AND LEGENDS Twelfth Edition
July 15, 2022, Irvine, CA, USA. Thanks to the Editor-in-Chief: Kalpna Singh-Chitnis.

My Poetry in Life and Legends
My poetry is in great company here in LIFE AND LEGENDS Twelfth Edition
July 15, 2022, Irvine, CA, USA. Thanks to the Editor-in-Chief: Kalpna Singh-Chitnis.
#peacepoetry A collaborative poem by Sandile Ngidi and Yuri Kageyama March 2022 ~ May 2022
Sandile
We are crushed still, bulldozed, uneasy.
Give bread, paska, borscht now.
Sink the molten nerves, war hormones.
Pray fair winds, pebbles, sumac delights.
Rachel Corrie flowers, Westbank’s red ruins.
Yuri
Phan Thi Kim Phuc’s back,
Silent chants, red smoke, orphans cry.
Blue and yellow flurry on Tokyo streets,
“We stand with Ukraine.”
Fissions of fear, hypersonic glide.
Kent State My Lai Mariupol
Akiko Yosano tells us: Mountains will move,
Shuddering dark loins, tangled hair to lips.
Sandile
Stoop, Russians, stoop,
War dogs eat death you planted in the fields.
Spit its blood like wastewater.
Smear the gunpowder to sanctify your sword.
But no gun can kill the hills’ brooding smiles,
Butterflies will survive the heavy rains.
Yuri
When “tactical” dwarfs Hiroshima, Nagasaki,
“Neo-Nazi” is not a name for anyone,
Retreat sends an attack more frenzied than ever.
Poets speak above the silence,
Purify the Meaninglessness
Of words gone Mad.
Sandile
This ominous cloud
Racial hate in sniper fire.
Your fresh light
Brave in stunning pearls.
Still stubborn as our knees.
Your tenacious love,
Shireen Abu Aqleh.
Vibrant in the storms of black powder rains.
Black stones.
Red shrines.
Coral noctilucence.
Yuri
Children in Ukraine and Fukushima
Are sick with thyroid cancer,
More than the usual two in a million.
She cries remembering that day a decade ago,
When doctors tell her you’ll die at 23 without surgery,
“I was wearing a new dress and new sandals.”
ASYLUM
A poem by Yuri Kageyama Feb. 26, 2022
She barely remembers the rape
Monsters grow only in drugless sleep
She is well taken care of
—
Air raid on Tokyo
Baghdad
Dresden
Ukraine
— —
She no longer draws but
Cuts papers of color
Into ferns and flowers
— — —
Hunger in Biafra
A scream in Vietnam
Van Gogh’s ear
The Apology
_ A poem by Yuri Kageyama
My voice screaming banzai
Ten thousand years banzai
Dying in glee as the divine devil wind
For the crane god whose voice I heard too late
My hand piercing your baby
A glob of meat with my bayonet
Raping girls in the name of comfort
Burning a city like a Sherman deranged
My heart that worships history
To win status as an honorary white
Bleeding streaks from a fluttering red sun
Despising those of the same yellow skin
My voice
My hand
My heart
My voice will never speak that way again
My hand will never act that way again
My heart will never feel that way again
No apology is enough but I promise
And I apologize
KAMIKAZE
A poem by Yuri Kageyama
with
Yuuichiro Ishii on Guitar
Okaasan
Boku wa ashita shutsugeki shimasu.
I take off on my mission tomorrow.
I am so sorry I have not been a good son, leaving you so soon.
It’s such a peaceful evening _ so quiet I can almost hear the fireflies glowing.
I don’t know why, but I am filled with happiness, well, maybe not happiness, since I must say goodbye.
But this feeling fills my heart, all the way to the top of my pilot helmet, like a stretching sky without a single cloud.
I will fly my Zero, and fly and fly.
Into that perfect rainbow circle of hope.
photo by Eba Chan
“Hiroshima” and “A Mother Speaks” Poetry written and read by Yuri Kageyama with Hirokazu Suyama on cajon and Yuuichiro Ishii on guitar. “Hiroshima” music composed by Nobutaka Yamasaki. Performed at a benefit for March 8, 2015 International Women’s Day at What the Dickens in Ebisu, Tokyo.
HIROSHIMA
Poetry by Yuri Kageyama
they wander like a whisper
still
over this city
blending with the sea breeze
the soft light
the cracks of scars
not just one ghost or two
but tens of thousands
who all looked up and saw a flash
turning people into dead globs of charcoal;
there are no photos from that day,
they wander, crawling, naked, moaning,
flesh hanging like tatters;
they’re asking that question,
we did nothing wrong
why oh why
when all it can do is
kill kill kill kill
nothing else
turning skin eyeballs laughter head back legs
into a keloid of hell,
but no one really answers.
NEWS FROM FUKUSHIMA: A MOTHER SPEAKS
Poetry by Yuri Kageyama
Please listen and tell the world.
How our children in Fukushima are getting thyroid cancer, one by one.
My daughter is one of them.
Pediatric thyroid cancer is rare.
The chance for getting it is under one in a million.
One in a million.
But in Fukushima, it’s 112 out of 380,000 children tested, and the tally is growing.
This is Fukushima after Three-Eleven.
Beautiful Fukushima, where rice paddies stretch between lazy mountains.
Beautiful Fukushima, where snow falls everywhere like fluffy rice.
Beautiful Fukushima, where, when spring finally comes, cherry trees explode in pink chiffon.
But this is Fukushima after Three-Eleven.
No other place in Japan is like that.
No other place in the world is like that _ except for the Ukraine and Belarus.
But they say these cases are turning up because we are looking so much harder, testing all the children in Fukushima.
The authorities say they are playing it safe.
When no one really feels safe
After Three-Eleven in Fukushima.
My little girl got surgery and so her tumor was removed.
And the doctor told me: Aren’t you so lucky?
Aren’t you so lucky we did those tests to save your child?
If we hadn’t, the cancer might not have been found.
But I don’t feel lucky.
I don’t feel lucky at all.
photo by Yuri Kageyama
HIROSHIMA
a poem by Yuri Kageyama and the Yuricane
Hirokazu Suyama on drums, Hiroshi Tokieda on bass and Yuuichiro Ishii on guitar.
Film by Adam Lewis.
At the Japan Writers Conference in Okinawa Nov. 2, 2013.
they wander like a whisper
still
over this city
blending with the sea breeze
the soft light
the cracks of scars
not just one ghost or two
but tens of thousands
who all looked up and saw a flash
turning people into dead globs of charcoal;
there are no photos from that day,
they wander, crawling, naked, moaning,
flesh hanging like tatters;
they’re asking that question,
we did nothing wrong
why oh why
when all it can do is
kill kill kill kill
nothing else
turning skin eyeballs laughter head back legs
into a keloid of hell,
but no one really answers.