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.