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Emperor by Ryuichi Tamura
There are eyes in the stone, the eyes
closed in grief and fatigue.
The man in black passes my door –
You, the Emperor of Winter,
my lonely Emperor, walking to your own
grave in Europe,
your white forehead shadowed by
civilisation
your back to the sun.
Your self-punishment is so painful,
Flowers! You stretch out your hands to
them.
But universal winter has set in
after the era of reason and progress.
European beauties are nothing but
fantasies.
Who will kiss your hands
whose fated palms are dark and dry and
barren?
Flowers! Those scars are flowers.
The Country That Once Was (EMULATION)
Blossoms of old
smothered with unforgiving cold and hardened white.
Scars on bodies too tired to planted flowers
and too stained with grief to care.
A snowglobe
shaken by manmade killers and setting suns.
Put on display by those who crafted it’s clear walls
those who stuffed it with grief and fatigue.
A dying star
shaking the ground to shake the snow
and startitalloveragain.
A cycle
of cold of despair of utter trepidation
but they trudge with tired feet towards
the land that never belonged on a fireplace mantle.
Onwards
towards fields of flowers grown in ashes
that cover the white and still graveyard
of a country that once was.
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