Dead Boy

^{translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles}

I am a boy, having never known love, 
Who has suddenly fallen from the summit  
Of frightening infancy into the darkness of a well 
Dark, watery hands choke my delicate neck 
Innumerable needles of cold push into me, 
Killing my heart, wet as a fish 
Inside, each organ swells like a flower 
As I move horizontally below the earth 
Along the surface of the water  
Eventually, from the green horn in my groin 
A sprout, unreliable and delicate, will grow 
Clawing up the heavy soil with thin hands 
One day, like a pallid face, 
Its tree will rustle under the painful light 
For I desire as much space inside me  
For light as space for shadow

死んだ少年

ぼくは　愛も知らず
怖ろしい幼年時代の頂きから　突然
井戸の暗みに落ちこんだ少年だ
くらい水の手が　ぼくのひよわなのどをしめ
つめたさの無数の雛が　押し入って来ては
ぼくの　魚のように濡れた心臓をあやめる
ぼくは　すべての内臓で　花のようにふくれ
地下水の表面を　水平にうごいていく
ぼくの股の青くさいつのからは　やがて
たよりない芽が生え　重苦しい土を
かぼそい手で　這いのぼっていくだろう 
青ざめた顔のような一本の樹が
痛い光の下にそよぐ日が来るだろう 
ぼくは　影の部分と同じほど
ぼくの中に　光の部分がほしいのだ

Copyright © 2024 by Mutsuo Takahashi and Jeffrey Angles. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 19, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“[‘Dead Boy’]: This poem was included in my second book of poems, Bara no Ki, Nise no Koibito-tachi [Rose Tree, Fake Lovers], published in September 1964 by Gendaishi Kōbōsha. My first collection of poems, Mino, Atashi no Oushi [Mino, My Bull], was published in November 1959 by Sabaku Shinjin Shudan Jimuyoku [Office of the Desert Poets]. In 1946, when I was seven years old, I started writing things that resembled poems, but my work really began to take poetic form around 1953, when I was fourteen. Mino, My Bull contained thirty-four poems written between then and the time that I was twenty-one. I wrote them in Kitakyushu, the city where I lived at the time, and most of them were printed in Sabaku [Desert], a magazine financed by its contributing members and published in Kitakyushu. ‘Dead Boy’ came in my second book, Rose Tree, Fake Lovers, but it still retains a strong whiff of the earlier Mino, Atashi no Oushi. The poem is characterized by narcissism and its subjugation. The ultimate place for adolescent narcissism is death. The boy here is looking at a ‘tree’ that ‘rustle[s] under the painful light.’ This poem is a somewhat regressive self-portrait of me at that age.”
—Mutsuo Takahashi, translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles