Cherry Blossoms at Night

Helen Keller owned an Akita named Kamikaze, before the word had connotations of suicide bombers and meant merely “divine wind”. It seems like a strange name for a dog. In the Akita Journal, she wrote, “If ever there was an angel in fur, it was Kamikaze.”

Kamikaze fleas
cutting through the fluffy clouds
...Close my eyes and leap

Toward the end of WWII, the Japanese army put young girls to work to fashion a number of balloons from rice paper, the air inside heated by tiny torches. The balloons were just strong enough to cross the Pacific when the atmospheric conditions were right. Dangling beneath each was a single bomb.

The spirits left town
unwilling to find out if
split atoms hurt ghosts.

Nearly 1000 were released, a third of them actually making it to the US, and though they didn't cause much damage, one of them did kill a pastor's wife and five of their children picnicking in Southern Oregon. A plaque and a number of cherry trees mark the spot today. Unexploded bombs were still being found 20 years later.

Rain of weightless grit
Infectious ash on our tongues
strange weather these days 

There was another plan which would have released plague-infested fleas from planes carried in the bellies of submarines off the shore of San Diego. This operation was code-named “Cherry Blossoms at Night”. We dropped two atom bombs on the country before the plan could be put into effect.

A milkweed hand grenade
explodes; night obscured

by downy shrapnel

The night is so black I can’t see a thing, the moon smothered by clouds. Early autumn and the air churns with the creaking of insects. The cherry leaves, already starting to burn pink and crimson, will soon be drifting downwards, too heavy to hold on to their limbs any longer, calendar pages blanketing the ground.