We present this work in honor of the Vernal Equinox.
In the loneliness of my heart
I feel as if I should perish
Like the pale dew-drop
Upon the grass of my garden
In the gathering shades of twilight.
We present this work in honor of the 675th anniversary of the poet’s death.
Who travels the Way heeds the Heart’s and the Way’s beginnings,
But the Way’s everywhere, without boundaries —
I’ll go till the rivers run dry, exhaust the peaks:
In the calm of the clouds I’ll sit, and watch the moon light up the heavens.
We present this work in honor of the 1,320th anniversary of the poet’s death.
Oh, the autumn foliage
Of the hill of Kamioka!
My good Lord and Sovereign
Would see it in the evening
And ask of it in the morning.
On that very hill from afar
I gaze, wondering
If he sees it today,
Or asks of it tomorrow.
Sadness I feel at eve,
And heart-rending grief at morn –
The sleeves of my coarse-cloth robe
Are never for a moment dry.
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 60th birthday.
Set off to see for myself
my father’s name
carved in a Tohoku museum
Once the “world’s strongest,”
my father’s magnet
crouches on a shelf
Monday morning
the head of the Magnetic Research Institute
picks out his necktie
My father, perfectly at home
with rare earth elements,
loves Modigliani women
“Writing more love poems?”
half humorously
half anxiously
His present—
Sanuki noodles—
comes stuffed in a company envelope
Something warm in the way
he calls his wife “Mother”
without the least hesitation
He wipes his face with a hot towel
and sighs contentedly—
looking at him now I see an ordinary man
Moving away from the telephone
he sips his tea as if to say
“I’m not listening”
Forgiven
their inability to express tenderness—
men of my father’s generation
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 85th birthday.
Mounting a horse with an abundant mane and in glittery armor, a hero
will have to have a face as dazzling as that orb of day.
But a base one ordered to sing of heroes,
I cannot have a face, however ordinary.
Like a photo of the hateful man an abandoned woman tore into shreds,
My face is torn apart and lost in advance.
Faceless, holding in both hands a lyre quite like a face,
on a hill with a view of the field shining with battle dust, under a plane tree,
or on a boulder of a cape overlooking the sea where triremes come and go,
I sit for thousands of years, I just continue to sit.
The odes that, faceless, I sing in praise of passing heroes
overflow as beautiful blood from the chest would I hade with the lyre.
We present this work in honor of the Japanese holiday, Labor Thanksgiving Day.
Hoya is now
in the middle of autumn. I am now
in the middle of misery
The misery has deep origins
It has a deep-rooted history.
Blazing summer has finally ended
Autumn breezes pass from one end to the other of the Musashino plain
My small house sits on a spot
in dark Musashino, silent Musashino
In my small house
I have a small room of my own
In the small room I turn on a light
I labor, zeroing in on my misery,
until the deep-rooted misery in my heart
thrusts its roots into the earth, and
grows into that gigantic Zelkova tree
in my forsaken backyard
We present this work in honor of the Japanese holiday, Culture Day.
We may realize
that people are merely dreams:
the house abandoned,
its wild garden becomes home
to a swarm of butterflies.
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 135th birthday.
When you told me you would be gone
But a little while,
I nodded gently.
I was so young, so innocent.
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 155th birthday.
The man
I used to meet in the mirror
is no more.
Now I see a wasted face.
It dribbles tears.
We present this work in honor of Autumnal Equinox Day.
From Nigitatsu
Would we set sail, and
Did await the moon, but
With the tides against us
Now must we go a’rowing!
Poets Corner 