written By
I love you, Kumamoto. But my missions are in a state of decay. The limestone
aqueducts, once traversing proudly alongside the Piedras Creek, the ones that
pumped crystalline liquid into the mouths of my native born children, are
dried. They too have crumbled under the heat of June air raids; they are
mercury to the touch. A foolish child even took a knife and scrawled into my
mossy contoured places, ‘Great Tit!’ Yes, I have since relinquished my walls to
such awful graffiti, so crass, so thoughtless— But I know that you would
cackle at the irony, Kumamoto, like a perching songbird with a green breast.
Your laughter was always an alarm call, but your hilltop castles from the
sixteenth century tower above this smut and gunfire, impregnable. I see the
bombs descending upon my palm-lined streets, but I know they first touched
down upon your distant pavements; Our mutual calamity became the center
that holds us together, our scarred and sunken ground zero. Dirty needles and
cigarette butts people my gutters, but blackened children line yours under
cherry blossoms. The same coordinates where a silver plane dropped an
inferno onto your hot pink camellia flowers also was where a calico cat named
Rita lighted its bushy tail on a burning candlewick, dissolving into the fierce
southwestern sunshine, All while its careless owner took a siesta and dreamt
of deer leaping over a wire fence. Now, that’s what I call some hot pussy,
Kumamoto! The earthquakes rage, but I love you still. —San Antone
