Fujiwara Teika: another Japanese Poet
But first to inflict you with another of mine:
Endings
Some endings stand out more than others.
Others are commonplace and fade from memory.
Some are known at the time…
like the last time I talked to my mother
Or when I last held my red-haired love…
Other endings aren’t known, but are
Only recognized as such after the event.
Like when I last saw her striding
Purposely out of the terminal to board
The plane in that little
Iowa town.
Would I have run to her and held her
Close one more time if I had known?
Or when I watched you wave goodbye
From the rear window of that departing car,
How could I have known it was the last time
And that you were forever lost to me?
And the last time that I carried my daughter,
Or held her little hand as we walked along.
When I let go of her, what would I have done
If I had known
It was the last time?
Fujiwara Teika (1162-1241) is considered by many to be the preeminent Japanese poet. A poet, diarist, and critic, his influence on premodern Japanese poetry has been unsurpassed according to some critics.
It is still amazing to me to read of all these eminent poets and other people of the arts still venerated hundreds of years later in Japan. I can only think of a very few examples of such in the western world still held in such honor by the populace. This probably is simply a reflection of my own ignorance of the subject.
His poetry specialized almost exclusively in the waka, the dominant lyrical form of the Japanese classical period, a five-line poem consisting of thirty-one syllables, arranged in measures of five syllables, then seven, five, seven, and seven (5-7-5-7-7).
Touched by drizzling rain,
All around, the treetops
With their colours say
Autumn in evening is
A time of change, indeed.
As I gaze out,
Neither blossom nor Autumn leaves
Are here;
In a beachfront hut
On an Autumn evening.
Fallen rain dripping
From the leaning eaves
So shallow that
Swiftly in pours
The moonlight.
Awaiting one whose
Path among the foothills
Has vanished, I think;
The cedar by my eaves
Is buried deep in snow.
I gently smoothed
Those raven tresses
Strand by strand; now
I lie down
Her face floats before me.
Links:
Another biography with poems
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