No Longer Human | Teen Ink

No Longer Human

December 2, 2016
By ShirleyZhou SILVER, Easthampton, Massachusetts
ShirleyZhou SILVER, Easthampton, Massachusetts
9 articles 9 photos 0 comments

To Yozo:

Now, Yozo
I am looking into your death
The play is ending
The wall is collapsing
And your body, is falling back
Into the field of sunflowers.

No longer will there be pressing hands
Anxious eyes
Or wandering souls.
No longer will there be cold winter nights
When you drink yourself to sleep
Choke, cough, and cry tears,
In the white smoky fog.

Not any more, Yozo
You can close your mouth and quit the smile
No more rigid poises in black family photos
No more hollowness, grey houses, old wooden shelves
Covered with vicious termites

All those strange women you’ve loved
Are gone, Gone with the Wind
The white powder on their faces melts
Their bare feet soak in the bitter waves of the sea
And they drown.

All those cigarette ends, buried in the snow
Are no longer burning
Not even shining
No more, no more shivering fingers, yellow teeth
Ragged clothes,
Wrinkled skin.

No more, Yozo
You have no more fear to chew
No more sorrow to mourn
No more dark to endure
And no more happiness to lose.

Yozo, I see you
You run down the hill
The clouds high, the sky blue
All the wind is behind you
The dream chases you
And you laugh.

Yozo, I see you
You run
You run beyond the sea
You run beyond the space
You run out of the boundaries
Of this suffocating, cold, crowded world.

No longer, will anything be able to catch you
To pull you back
To grasp your throat
To hurt you.

Don't come back
Yozo
Don't come back!
Don't come back!
 


The author's comments:

This poem was written for the main character Yozo from a Japanese novel called No Longer Human.


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