Orphan Planet by Yumi Fuzuki

Having stored up a gaze
The infant’s eye pierced me.
The lustre of those unclouded black irises,
Transparent as a clear sky,
I stood up and it swallowed me whole.
People call this giving birth.
Just as I would peer into clouds,
I followed after the vibrating pupils.

Twenty years later, we passed each other in the street,
You’d been sharpened into an adult,
In the glinting train window, a needle aligned in a row.
With your face that could be a boy’s or a girl’s,
Smiling faintly at someone.

(Everyone is dancing,
but that was the sound of a needle breaking.
I’ll cover your ears,  
cover your eyes.
Ten years later, no one will remember today.
I pray that you’ll have soundly let it pass.)

Pulling out from the station, you look up,
A sky with the eyes of an orphan.
Beyond where its gaze reaches,
Are we duly giving birth to the future?
The things we’ve done beneath this sky—All of them   
can we confess them to this sky?

That day, uprooted and snatched away,
We loathed the spring.
Even after clearing away its shape and form,
Making sure not a shred was left,
We obsessively made off with the waves.
So were the needles’ days grown long,
One after another, they pierced the sky.
The needles pricked the sky to life, flooding it in light.
Before long, will it awaken to the eternal morning?

In your eyes,
The sky has found the home to which it will return. 

Translation: Jordan A. Y. Smith