Selected poems from the Koetsu handscroll

Is there no moon?

And is this springtime not the spring

of times gone by?

Myself alone remaining

still the self it was before?

That autumn has come

appears nowhere with clarity

to the observing eye:

It is a new sound in the wind

by which we are somehow made aware.

Who now remains

for me to claim as one I know?

For the ancient pine

of Takasago was not, alas,

among my childhood friends.

They need not burn it -

grass will smolder by itself

into new growth:

Kasuga's burgeoning fields

may be left to the spring day's fire.

(c) Copyright 2000. The Christian Science Publishing Society