Patrick O’Reilly (he/they/it/anything) is a poet from Renews, NL. Patrick is responsible for two chapbooks, A Collapsible Newfoundland (Frog Hollow, 2020) and Demographic Report, November 2023 (Cactus Press, 2024).
“In the early 1960s, a New Wave broke across Japanese cinema. A coterie of young filmmakers found fertile ground in the alienation and dislocation wrought by Japan’s WWII surrender, the unspeakable trauma of the atomic bomb, and the cultural disruptions brought by the occupying Americans’ reconstruction and modernization efforts.
“On the other side of the world, another island was experiencing a parallel reaction to modernity. Following 50 years of disasters—natural, economic, political, martial—Newfoundland foreswore independence in favour of confederation with Canada. What followed was a painful shift in national identity from sovereign nation with an essentially agrarian way of life to marginal province expected to keep up with the ever-expanding demands of industrialization. As Japan was experiencing an artistic boom, Newfoundland was pursuing a traumatic resettlement program that saw thousands forced to leave their outport homes for centralized industrial communities.
“But while the fortunes of Japan and Newfoundland contrast sharply, the two coastal countries are bound by the tension both experience between modernity and tradition. This tension gives way to a host of cognates: shared and differing relationships to death; to land and sea; to concepts of inheritance, responsibility, and belonging. The three films of the poem’s title—Woman in the Dunes (Suno no onna, 1964, dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara), The Naked Island (Hadaka no shima, 1960, dir. Kaneto Shindo), and Pitfall (Otoshiana, 1962, again dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara)—all touch on these themes and suggest the possibility of dialogue.
“This poem is a trio of epistles from Newfoundland to Japan, a shout of recognition and a reaching out for connection from the other side of the world.”
Woman in the Dunes (Suna no onna)
Hiroshi:
Harris, the backhoe driver,
spreads decades of sand over Route 10.
They keeps it in heaps up at the highroad garage.
Each spring, runoff rives the earth and the place feels gutted.
Last October, our grandmother died and we buried her
in a hole in the ground that was like the door to winter.
All winter I watched a nest fill up with snow
as black sand drifted from Harris’s gritter.
The seasons deepen and then cave in.
I have seen the rockface of another.
I am drowning in time and I wish I had a woman
whose creases I could swab the sand from. I wish
a great wave would bring her to me,
then wash the ground out from under us.
The Naked Island (Hadaka no shima)
Kaneto:
I know how little one can say
when one needs to say
everything
The kettle calls.
Grandmother carries water
from well to kettle
kettle to cup
cup to saucer
which her husband lifts and
laps, cat-like, while his hands rattle.
They haven’t spoken in 40 years.
A quarrel between time and the weather
are the seasons.
When she clears her throat
through the open window he scampers
back to his garden.
Her knees are sore and full of
coming rain: before it starts or by and by
he may come in, potato,
pomme de terre, in hand.
For her.
The hill erodes
just slower than we will.
All across the Island, the ground
so bare you can see her ribs
straining,
careful to spill
not the drop.
Pitfall (Otoshiana)
Hiroshi:
“Here” is the root cellar of the world,
where we mine the polish of rot.
Turnips return to primordial ooze.
A furtive flash of parsnip mold
scuffs the sore-as-sin
eye of a potato.
Smell of ground more dusk than dust.
A whiff of oily rag.
We want to fill this ground with holes.
We try to fill ourselves with holes
but every thing our shovel breaks
is the heart of an ancestor:
bone, bog-body, Precambrian bug.
We dig and then we bury.
