I sit alone in my grandmother’s blue tea room

where a sword still hangs above the cold and empty

hearth. on a low table, a celadon rice bowl

has become a skull sprinkled with dust and dead moths

beside tarnished silver chopsticks set like crossbones.

my hands run over the tablecloth, worn and soft

whose threads break and break and, when broken, will no more

hide the colonial scars in the grain beneath.

I shutter my eyes, and my grandmother enters

the room with a tea pot and a box of tea cakes.

let us drink our tea before it gets cold, she says.

listen to the silence that speaks, and remember

the sun never rises in the west, which has no

word for the light that shines through the branches of trees.

I've known this word since I was young: komorebi.