BRANDON NAKASATO - POEMS

Brandon Nakasato, 36, of Anchorage, Alaska is a Research Analyst with Alaska's Department of Health. Nakasato has been published previously in Vox Poetica, The Houston Literary Review, The Catalonian Review and Calliope Nerve. He is the former editor of the magazine, CENTURY 121, and is currently finishing his first collection of poems.

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Re-collection
​

​As End of Line nears,
Life is nothing 
but the whisper of echoes.


We are now deaf to a familiar siren:
Sepia-tone nostalgia.
And bare-breasted Justice 
has removed her blindfold.


What remains
of discernible sound
is the sound of ourselves
within ourselves
as we descend
an unwinding helical staircase.


We are compelled
down into formless depths
to relearn the lesson
taught to billions before:
Your birth and your death
are yours only
and your only truly
unique possessions.
 

inside a vespertine stream
​

​the sounds of
murmur rain
make me slur
my thoughts into sleepiness
like striding into a vespertine stream

and a righteous dream reigns supreme inside a profane mind 
until Dawn with her alchemy
crack-cracks the shell again

so that each morning is a berth
and nostalgia is really mourning 
     in search of epiphanies
     in thrall to furores
     in defiance of contemporary yokes
 
 
 

Honne and Tatamae
​

​With his charity My Love
chastised:
There are differences
between 
your inside and outside.

But I wished to know him.
For us to be face-to-face
and share true sounds.

In our sanctuary My Love 
wondered:
Why a facade for some,
and an intense difference for me?

Under cover,
I breathed:
Because the light is for you,
My Love.
 
 
 
 

Only See Awakening
​

​I wake up.
I wake up with no day.
And it is darker.
I remember the last twilight.
It was beautiful
but it is fleeting, and
Darkness follows.
I look to the moonlight,
but it is mere reflection.
Darkness subsumes 
the image not material.
I wake once,
just once more.
And it is darker still.
I can see no difference,
between light and night.
I was-am in one and the other:
And, so, in all of time
we can touch absolutes.
If we can only see.
 
 
 

Hymn of Ancient Hope
​

​For eighteen generations
I've called to hearts of stone.
And for as many
I've brought greens,
and black eyed peas
to the table.

For, the substance
and the symbol, of such
was to be for all of us.

I've called to hearts of stone.
And imagined tongue and air
could chisel to the nub of them.
And I've been met
with a grotesque mettle.

*                     *                       *

Under the gray cloudcover
with its shorter shadows
I had later sight
of the stone-breaker.

He testified from a
hymnal of ancient hope.
He spoke
of blue streams
and clouds breaking
with light intrepid,
Audaciously
breaking their aloof perch.
He spoke of trust in shared destiny,
and of our eventual reconciliation.
When I would enter the "We, the People"
of the sojourning dream. 

Amazing, Grace
touched their hearts.
And what America could be,
We had become.

One people equally, 
one family united.