mark osaki

 

 

Unspoken Correspondence


All night I dreamed of you
trying to free a child’s name
hooked deeply in your throat,
your gasping mouth a dark hole
emptied of everything
but a single word.

In a place already fluent with pain
you have the whisper of a chance
stuck with the son, the undying echo
you can’t pronounce.

If I say nothing,
you will understand
how sorry the tongue is
concerning these things,
how tied to its roots
is grief.


Mark Osaki's work has appeared in various journals and anthologies, including: The Georgia Review , Carrying the Darkness—The Poetry of the Vietnam War (Avon, Texas Tech University Press), South Carolina Review , Men of Our Time—An Anthology of Male Poetry in Contemporary America (University of Georgia Press), Breaking Silence—An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Poets (Greenfield Review Press), Onset Review and Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac (National Public Radio).

 

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