Everett Poetry Nite, October 6, 2025
Kenjiro Nomura, Artist
Celebrating the Japanese-American artist Kenjiro Nomura (1896-1956)
1. Black and White
The driven leaves are gone
and skeletal woods are rising from the dead
to clothe the black with flesh again.
Spilt ink on a blank page:
ragged black clouds feather downward,
diminishing the white sky.
Suffering gives birth to happiness,
happiness to suffering.
Separately, they are black ink
on black paper
or white on white.
The evil and the good define each other.
They love one another as pure black ink
loves the purity of whiteness.
Like all opposites,
black and white produce each other,
imply each other,
and conceptually are yoked together.
2. Color
Streaming from the prism between the people and God
are seven point seven billion slivers of light.
A stunning diversity of color is flowing from the white.
Each sliver is unique on the limitless color wheel.
Red, orange, yellow, green, blue,
indigo, and violet are at one with the original whole.
The rainbow is one continuum, like branches and the bole,
connecting people with people and the people with God.
Extinguish the light source and the colors disappear!
All human diversity is part of a greater unity.
Our sense of a separate self is a functional necessity,
but the focus on the separate self is the cause of suffering.
Focus instead on the infinite divine self,
which represents true reality, and you will find
the source of light for the life of all mankind
beyond the prism between the people and God.
NOTE: I read this tribute in February 2022 at the Cascadia Art Museum in Edmonds, WA, for the celebration of the life of Seattle artist Kenjiro Nomura.
Evening Land
As I stooped through the low portal of death,
I saw my human fate
emptied out into a lethe.
Life’s luggage of love and hate
was left behind the wall;
the gardener burned my once-essential freight.
I asked myself if this was all.
Intelligent souls clicked like dolphins in the wind
on either side of the wall,
discerning everything. My mind
came clean; discernment whirled ahead
as soon as I was schooled by the garrulous wind.
Now that I am dead,
I know that God did not create the soul;
the soul created God instead.
Now that I am dead, I know the soul
imagined heaven straddling earth
where God was hired to rule
irascible man and iterative death/rebirth.
I dreamed of an infinite life,
a dream encoded before my birth,
because one life was not enough.
I know that paradise was once inside my head,
now that I am dead.
NOTE: Written after reading “Evening Land” by Pär Lagerkvist. Lagerkvist won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1951.
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1066
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?
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?
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?
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