Poems for 16 April 2005: Three From the Japanese
April 16th, 2005Today’s selections come from a book entitled One Hundred Poems From the Japanese, a collection selected and translated by Kenneth Rexroth. It’s one of my favorite collections of poetry, because the poems are all so simple and short - and yet, they are alive with imagery and emotion. Here are three:
In the empty mountains
The leaves of the bamboo grass
Rustle in the wind.
I think of a girl
Who is not here.-Hitomaro
The cicada sings
In the rotton willow.
Antares, the fire star,
Rolls in the west.-Anonymous
The mists rise over
The still pools at Asuka.
Memory does not
Pass away so easily.-Akahito
One way to observe National Poetry Month is to take a poem out to lunch or put a poem in your lunchbox. (Yeah, some of these suggestions sound pretty hokey to me too.)