‘Lord Nyo’s Lament’

Lord Fudo

I promised a response by the character Lord Nyo last week, little suspecting the trouble I would have in fashioning this poem.  In part it was because I was trying to develop his character within the context of this poetry, and in part because I kept going far afield in the doing of this. Perhaps the best excuse is that there were so many ‘issues’ that seemed applicable to his being that I couldn’t choose what to write and what to leave out. 

I kept thinking of the poet/priest Saigyo, one of my favorite Japanese poets: he had been a samurai, trained early in the service of a powerful family, a captain of the guard by the time he was eighteen, and then he became a Buddhist priest around the age of twenty-three.  His concern, as he expressed it in letters and poetry, was that his new Buddhist belief and practice would be scarred by his samurai past. He acknowledged the duel between his spiritual side and his warrior past and he was sensitive to what this all meant as he travelled Japan as a beggar priest-poet.

This is not exactly what Lord Nyo is facing: but there is some consciousness in there making him uncomfortable by his actions towards his wife.  Readers have expressed that he was a brute, was brutish in his behavior towards Lady Nyo, and he is now contemplating what he has done.  So am I in trying to make poetry out of this violent fellow.

This is a first pass in this attempt, and it will have to go through some changes as this theme clarifies.

Fudo is a Buddhist deity, also important to the Yamabushi (Mountain warriors/priests) cult.  He is shown with a rope to bind up passions or to pull you from Hell, and a sword for cutting through illusions.

Lady Nyo

–

Lord Nyo’s Lament

–

The song of the arrow

As it flew into the sea

Was as tuneless

As a badly strung samisen.

–

Gun- metal clouds

Stretched across a dull horizon,

The sun still asleep

As he should be,

His quiver empty,

His heart, too.

–

When had the callousness of life

Become as comfortable as breath to him?

Too much the warrior,

Too little the man.

–

Perhaps he should pray.

What God would listen?

And then it came to him–

That joker of a Buddha, Fudo

With his rope to pull him from Hell

And his sword to cut through foolishness-

Fudo would listen.

Fudo knew the quaking hearts

The delusions embraced

To stomach battlefield gore.

The fog of drink,

To face  life-

A samurai in the service of Death.

Lord Fudo would listen.

–

He remembered  years before

When being near her

Watching her white wrist

Peek from her sleeve

With that river of passion

Just below the skin

She could bring him to his knees

With the promise of dark mystery

Between silken thighs

And how he had steeled his heart

Believing himself unmanned

For the love she induced.

–

Three cranes flew low to the shore,

Legs streaming like black ribbons behind.

Three cranes, three prayers, three chances

To find his way back

Bound up in Fudo’s ropes,

Prodded by Fudo’s sword.

–

He would write a poem

On a bone-white fan

To leave on her cushion.

She would know his love

She would know his sorrow.

He would eat his shame.

–

The sea took his arrows

Beyond the breakers,

The glint of sleek feathers

Catching thin rays of light.

A small peace came over him

As they journeyed far from his hands.

–

Jane Kohut-Bartels

Copyrighted, 2011

Tags: domestic violence, dversepoets.com, Japanese history, Lady Nyo, Lord Fudo, Lord Nyo's Lament, poetry, Samurai, Yamabushi cult