‘Lord Nyo’s Continuing Lament’ Part 5, from “The Nightingale’s Song”

–

Ome  is Plum in Japanese…as in Plum Tree. 

Kami  is a spirit, or demon…sort of.

Uguisu is one name for the Bush Warbler, or what stands in for the Nightingale.

 

Lady Nyo

–

Lord Nyo’s  Continuing Lament, Part 5

 –

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.

Who didn’t know sake was

The life-blood of their 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 an 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.

 –

He slept that night

Listening to the frogs of his childhood

And the nightingale in the plum,

Both bathed in the watery moonlight.

 –

Jane Kohut-Bartels

Copyrighted, 2011, 2013

Tags: 17th century Japan, fiction, from "The Nightingale's Song, Jane Kohut-Bartels, Lady Nyo, Lord Nyo's Continuing Lament, Ome Tree, poetry, Samurai