‘The Nightingale’s Song’

 This poem is a continuation in the ‘Lord/Lady Nyo’ poems.  The characters seem to have more to say.

 ‘Ome’ is literally a ‘blue-apricot’ , but we would call it a plum.  ‘Kami’ is a demon, or spirit.

I know of two birds, hototogisu and uguisu, both song birds, not ‘real’ nightingales.  The first, hototogisu, was called by Europeans a nightingale. The second one, uguisu, is called “poem-reading-bird”.

On the character displayed:  our concepts of emptiness, void  are not necessarily ‘bad’ to the Japanese: they see this emptiness as a positive thing.  A chance to make room, to return to a better nature, to throw off the forms of this world.

“Be nothing, become everything”.

–

The Nightingale’s Song

–

Lord Nyo was known

For three things:

Archery,

Drink,

Temper.

He was attempting a fourth:

Poetry.

It wasn’t going well.

–

Leaving orders not to be disturbed

(He would have only tea and rice)

The servants thought their master possessed–

Possessed by a demon!

Possessed by an uncaring kami.

Sake was the life-blood of master.

What was next?

Would he throw aside his two swords

And take the tonsure– become a monk?

–

By the pale light of a moon

Too thin to fatten the road,

Lord Nyo applied himself

To brush and paper

His face a terrible scowl,

His tongue gripped between his teeth,

The air peppered with grunts and soft curses.

–

The bullfrogs outside called to him.

He remembered this same effort

Decades ago when his Priest-tutor

Attempted to refine his calligraphy

When all he wanted was a sharp stick

To gig frogs.  Ah!

–

Through the night

Lady Nyo and her old nurse

Watched from across the hall,

Watched the candle flare up and die

As Lord Nyo burned each poem,

Knowing his words inelegant

Sensing his mind too dull to enflame

The love, forgiveness, passion of his wife.

–

Towards dawn the cry of uguisu

Pierced the dark,

Singing against the light

Of that watery moon-

The ‘poem-reading-bird’!

In a blossoming ome

Outside his window.

–

Her song went deep,

Rendering him helpless,

Stilling his whirling head,

Refreshing his heart.

It was such a simple thing.

–

Being of the world

He missed what was important.

Nature, in the form of a simple bird,

In the form of a tone-poem,

Was offering an answer:

A path to redemption

If only he would listen.

–

Lord Nyo picked up his brush,

Stroked it across the stone

Into the puddle of watery ink,

And with his wrist bent properly,

Wrote this character:

 

 

(Emptiness, a void, forgetting the forms of the material world.)

 

 

It was a start.

It was what the little bird sang:

Of emptiness, the void,

The return to his nature, to Nature,

That  finer nature,

Before the grizzled warrior–

The void where hope was possible,

Where his life could begin again.

–

He slept that night

Listening to the frogs of his childhood

And the nightingale in the plum,

Both bathed in watery moonlight.

–

Jane Kohut-Bartels

Copyrighted, 2011

The character displayed above was painted by a young Japanese monk in 1986. The website of

http://www.onmarkproductions.com/html/calligraphy1.shtml graciously supplied the illustration.

Tags: 'The Lady Nyo Poems', 'The Nightingale's Song', dversepoets.com, hototogisu, Jane Kohut-Bartels, jinglepoetry, kami, Lord Nyo, lulu.com, ome, poetry, songbirds in Japan, uguisu