In the Happo-En Garden, Tokyo
The way a birthmark on a woman’s face defines rather than mars her beauty, so the skyscrapers— those flowers of technology— reveal the perfection of the garden they surround. Perhaps Eden is buried here in Japan, where an incandescent koi slithers snakelike to the edge of the pond; where a black-haired Eve-san in the petalled folds of a kimono once showed her silken body to the sun, then picked a persimmon and with a small bow bit into it.
Copyright © 2014 by Linda Pastan. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on February 25, 2014. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.