Japanese Wind Telephone
When you asked me for a love poem
I told you about a glass booth
containing one black object:
a disconnected rotary phone,
shiny as whale-belly
from which the grieving
can dial the numbers
of their lost ones and speak
to the listening dead.
I promised
that after you were gone,
I’d keep telling you things:
how our children are growing,
how the blown apple blossom
fills the gutter outside our house,
how our neighbours still
make love so loudly
and when they wake me,
I find I have again
reached for your hand.
About this poem
This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2020. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The editor in 2020 was Janette Ayachi.
This poem illuminates the possibility of finding lost connections and catching missed chances in love, an installation of how to hold clairaudience and stay in touch regardless of separation. Sometimes we need a material object or prop in place to encourage us to honour or commune with our passed loved ones. Some totem as reminder, and how symbolic, this rotary telephone, disconnected from cable but hotwired to the ether and the other worldly. It’s simply stunning. I was also hooked by the touching image of the grieving woman at the end, reminded of the sounds and ringtone of love making through the walls, reaching for a body other than herself to grip in the midnight throes of loss and longing.
Author’s note:
A few years ago, I read a news article about a small town called Otsuchi in northern Japan, where 2,000 residents lost their lives in the devastating tsunami of 2011. A grieving local man placed an old phone booth containing a disconnected rotary phone at the bottom of his garden, where he would go and ‘talk’ to the person he had lost. Over time, word spread and many others visited to talk to the people they were missing. I found this story very moving and quite beautiful – a testament to our desire to keep communicating with the people we’ve lost – so I used the concept of the wind telephone as a sort of springboard for an odd love poem.
