“[…] The wind is rising! … We must try to live! […]”

—Paul Valéry, “The Graveyard by the Sea”

1.

these mackerel bones )

the same meal every day )

every curve a thrill )

2.

our country pays us

to make beautiful warplanes;

embrace irony

3.

still more irony:

to work hard at the office

you need family

4.

beautiful, cursed dreams—

all airplanes wait for the sky

to swallow them up

5.

the wind has risen!

through earthquakes, fire, and war,

we must try to live!

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Note: The 2013 Studio Ghibli movie written by Hayao Miyazaki was a blended story, based in part on the biography of Japanese airplane designer Jiro Horikoshi (1903-1982), and also incorporating unrelated story elements of The Wind Has Risen, a 1936 novel by Tatsuo Hori (1904-1953).

Randy Brown is author of the award-winning Welcome to FOB Haiku: War Poems from Inside the Wire. His 2022 hybrid prose-poetry project, Twelve O’Clock Haiku, is a lyrical meditation on the ethics of American strategic bombing practices in World War II, as viewed through the lens of an old war movie.