The Sacred Heart sister at Sophia
Posts me an airmail letter
With two sought-after stamps
For her twelve year-old collector.
Much later, on cassette,
She talks of doing a doctorate
On etiquette in Edo,
Plus a traveller’s guide for the Gaijin.
The millennium hosts its moment;
A tsunami coasts toward Christmas.
She tells me on the telephone
Of an essay on Shusako Endo,
The convert Catholic novelist,
His link an east-west ligature
And a job for her jubilee year.
Call and response continue
From the ’64 Olympics
To the karaoke bar
She runs with an Irish Jesuit
For mystical male alcoholics.
She has left stone fields in Ireland
For moss in a rock garden,
And the Celtic cross of her convent
For gravel curated in circles.
Now her cancer of the pancreas
Is assigned a last text-message
In the three moonlit lines
Of a Meiji death haiku.
