The Better Halves

‘The secret of survival in a place like

Sendai was clearly self-effacement ...’

Robert Fraser

One cold winter Sunday morning

at the main hall of a Buddhist temple complex

our local Italo-Japan Association

is calling down good fortune with its prayers

for the likes of Buffon, Maldini, Cannavaro ...

players from the national team

due here during their World Cup competition.

Televised, our wives throw handfuls of beans

for the occasion, in the event,

throw ceremonial tangerines

towards those believers’ raised arms.

Meanwhile, in that late morning’s pallid grey,

I’m at the non-event of a five-tier

pagoda undergoing restoration,

gazing at the impact, at the fact of it —

a scaffolding box with polythene sheet

soundless in the lack of any breeze.

I’m here on this non-occasion by a brazier,

a heat-contorted box of iron mesh

giving off heat, still filled with red-hot ash,

white plumes coughed out as they burn bric-à-brac

of remembrance, effigies and charms

that were to bring good fortune to last year.

And I warm myself at it as they all go up in smoke;

and I wait for our wives to reappear.

uncollected