by Zoria April

Poet's note: These two poems are the unpublished English translations of my visual poetry book Wordigami—the title is a wordplay on words + origami, poems made by folding words. Written when I was learning and discovering the ins and outs of Japanese language and still in awe from my first tourist visit in Japan, most of the poems are shaped like kanji characters and many of them recall memories of Japan. The content of each poem is centred around the meaning of the kanji character and should be ideally read in the same order as the kanji strokes are written.