Anthology of Japanese Literature Read Online Free PDF Page B

aloud.
ENVOYS
    I find no solace in my heart;
Like the bird flying behind the clouds
I weep aloud.
    Helpless and in pain,
I would run out and vanish,
But the thought of my children holds me.
    No children to wear them in wealthy homes,
They are thrown away as waste,
Those silks and quilted clothes!
    With no sackcloth for my children to wear,
Must I thus grieve,
For ever at a loss!
    Though vanishing like a bubble,
I live, praying that my life be long
Like a rope of a thousand fathoms.
    Humble as I am,
Like an armband of coarse twill,
How I crave a thousand years of life!
    Yamanoue Okura
    An elegy on the death of Furuhi
What worth to me the seven treasures,
So prized and desired by all the world?
Furuhi, born of us two,
Our love, our dear white pearl,
With dawn, with the morning star,
Frolicked about the bed with us, standing or sitting;
When dusk came with the evening star,
He pulled our hands, urged us to bed,
"Leave me not, father and mother,
Let me sleep between you,
Like saki-kusa, the three-stalked plant."
So spoke that lovely mouth.
Then we trusted, as one trusts in a great ship,
That he would grow up as time passed by,
And we should watch him, both in weal and woe.
But, as of a sudden sweeps the storm,
Illness caught our son.
Helpless and in grief,
I braced my sleeves with white cord,
Grasped my shining mirror,
And gazing up into the sky
I appealed to the gods of heaven;
Dropping my forehead to the ground
Madly I prayed to the gods of earth:
"It is yours to decide his fate,
To cure him or to let him die."
Nothing availed my prayers,
He languished day by day,
His voice failed each morning,
His mortal life ebbed out.
Wildly I leapt and kicked the floor,
Cried, stared up, stared down,
And beat my breast in grief.
But the child from my arms has flown;
So goes the world. . . .
ENVOYS
    So young he will not know the way;
Here is a fee for you,
O courier from the Nether World,
Bear him on your back.
With offerings I beseech you,
Be true and lead him up
Straight along the road to heaven!
    Attributed to Yamanoue 0kura
    On seeing a dead man while crossing the pass of Ashigara
He lies unloosened of his white clothes,
Perhaps of his wife's weaving
From hemp within her garden fence,
And girdled threefold round
Instead of once.
Perhaps after painful service done
He turned his footsteps home,
To see his parents and his wife;
And now, on this steep and sacred pass
In the eastern land of Azuma,
Chilled in his spare, thin clothes,
His black hair fallen loose—
Telling none his province,
Telling none his home,
Here on a journey he lies dead.
    From the Tanabe Sakimaro Collection
    . .
Love is a torment
Whenever we hide it.
Why not lay it bare
Like the moon that appears
From behind the mountain ledge?
    Anonymous
    . .
I will think of you, love,
On evenings when the gray mist
Rises above the rushes,
And chill sounds the voice
Of the wild ducks crying.
    Poem of a Frontier Guard
    Dialogue poems
Had I foreknown my sweet lord's coming,
My garden, now so rank with wild weeds,
I had strewn it with pearls!
    What use to me a house strewn with pearls?
The cottage hidden in wild weeds
Is enough, if I am with you.
Since I had shut the gate
And locked the door,
Whence did you, dear one, enter
To appear in my dream?
    Though you had shut the gate
And locked the door,
I must have come to you in your dream
Through the hole cut by a thief.
    Anonymous
    Lament for old age
When winter is gone and spring comes,
New is the year, and new the month;
But man grows old.
    All things are best when new;
But perchance with man
He alone is good who is old.
    Anonymous
    Referring to flowers
That you like me not
It may well be—
Yet will you not come
Even to see the orange tree
Abloom in my dooryard?
    Anonymous
    Referring to snow
Having met you as in a dream,
I feel I would dissolve, body and soul,
Like the snow that falls,
Darkening the heavens.
    Anonymous
    . .
Tonight I am