Good Morning
Fifty-some years after the war, a kamikaze lands in my yard,
gently, like a sheet of newsprint.
“Ohayo gozaimasu,” I say, though it is evening, light grown ochre
and pink, day disappearing across the Zero’s wings.
He shinnies from the cockpit, the thinnest man I’ve seen.
He has evaded the radar. He’s fallen
for decades, believing he’ll attack
the coast of America, setting all the pines in Oregon blazing.
I take him inside, where he drinks a glass of water.
It is clear. It tastes nothing like the ocean.
(originally appeared in Indiana Review)
