everything waves with uncertainty

I bought the pictured 1981 volume of Japanese Poetry in mid-March, at a really wonderful bookshop on Botanic Avenue in Belfast, just before lockdown came into force ...

... I've subsequently read it quite a bit over recent months, and here's a favourite verse from within, written by Michizō Tachihara:


Soon Autumn ...

Soon autumn will come.
Evenings talk to us, friendly,
trees cast shadows bare like gestures of old people
darkly towards the night,

and everything waves with uncertainty,
oddly, like quiet, shallow sighs ...
(Because it's not yesterday, it will be tomorrow)
our thoughts will whisper to each other.

- So the autumn has returned.
And the autumn pauses again, and
like someone asking for forgivness ...

soon, for having not forgotten, as a keepsake,
but leaving no keepsake, it will pass by.
The autumn ... and ... again, one evening -

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Michizō Tachihara (1914 - 1939)

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