Artwork: Installation by Chiharu Shiota, *Lost Words*, St. Nikolai Kirche, Berlin, 2017

It seems fitting that I rediscovered this poem I wrote for Chiharu Shiota’s installation at Berlin’s oldest church, St. Nikolai Kirche, titled Lost Words—a poem lost and then found. I rewrote it, and I think initially I just didn’t have the words to write it. The installation is fascinating, created with thousands of pages of the Bible in different languages, tangled and seemingly blown away by some invisible wind. The artwork was created to commemorate the 500th year of the Protestant Reformation that was celebrated in Germany in 2017. Shiota drew on her own history of migration, of her native Japan and having migrated to Germany where she now resides, and a kind of reverse migration of Portuguese missionaries in the 16th century who came from the west to spread Christianity in Japan. Christianity was subsequently banned in Japan, so that Japanese Christians had to go into hiding to practice their religion. The themes of immigration through storytelling is at the heart of Shiota’s work, with the black thread representing a universal element of connection, such as the night sky.

Shiota said this about Lost Words: “Our heart, soul and feelings empower the act of moving. They serve as the energy of our decisions and beliefs. My installation of floating Bible pages conveys this concept.

And here is the poem I wrote, inspired by the installation:

words, inspired

divine, arc through eons

shaped by different tongues

migrating as stories told

and prayers incanted

in whispers, at times

stifled as heresy

yet printed boldly

in faded ink

those words still live

inscribed in heart

and soul, the very essence

of being, belief

always to be heard

never to be erased

(Poem inspired by Chiharu Shiota’s installation, Lost Words, Berlin, 2017