a gentle distance encloses us

I've blipped from the pictured 1981 Japanese anthology a couple of times before - I bought it, relatively recently in mid-March 2020, at a really wonderful bookshop on Botanic Avenue in Belfast; all just before the original lockdown came into force last year ...

... and I have read through it an awful lot over the subsequent months - so, here's another favourite verse from within, written by Tanikawa Shuntaro (as translated by Hiroaki Sato):


Kiss

I close my eyes, the world recedes,
and only the weight of gentleness ascertains me without end. . . .

The silence becomes a quiet night
and turns round us like a promise;
it is now not something that separates
but rather a gentle distance that encloses us;
because of that we suddenly become something like one person. . . .

We explore each other
in a manner more certain than talking, seeing,
and we find us
when we have lost sight of ourselves—

What did I want to ascertain?
Gentleness that has returned from the distance,
in the silence that has lost words, that has been cleansed
you are now only breathing. . . .

You now are life itself. . . .
but even these words will be punished
when soon gentleness fills the world
and I fall in it to live.

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Tanikawa Shuntaro (1931 - )

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