Asakusa Shrine At Tokyo

By Georgia Bailey

Listen, through the Asakusa gate pass fourteen hundred years’ worth of spirits:

maybe you’ve been standing under this gate your whole life,

and in the trees behind are tied omikuji papers, reeling in the summer green

that spells bad fortune. The lost thing can’t be found; the person you are waiting for

won’t come. Listen; sometime around the year six hundred, two fishermen found a statue

caught in their net. Between the river current and whispering forest it is possible

to find a small slice of religion. 

What I’m trying to say is that standing below the Asakusa shrine at Tokyo

I start to feel the weight of fourteen hundred years of karmic destiny

channelled into its red majesty: 

feel it break into your bones as we pose by the torii for our touristy photo.

We age decades under a red gate ready to pass through it like air.