«
»

On the subject of Death…..

 

 

japanese-lovers-backdrop-1

One of the most beautiful and poignant tanka I have ever read:

Around the time of Izumi Shikibu’s daughter Naishi’s death, snow fell and melted away:

    Why did you vanish

     into empty sky?

     Even the fragile snow

     when it falls

     falls in this world.

                                                         ……Izumi Shikibu

 

It took me a moment to realize that Naishi was cremated.

Jane Kohut-Bartels

Copyrighted, 2019

Tags: , ,

This entry was posted on July 26, 2019 at 3:04 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

2 Responses to “On the subject of Death…..”

  1. rothpoetry Says:
    July 26, 2019 at 7:34 pm

    Beautiful!

    Like

  2. ladynyo Says:
    July 26, 2019 at 7:55 pm

    Thank you! She is one of my favorite poets..along with Ono no Komachi and Saigyo.

    Liked by 1 person

Leave a Reply

Please log in using one of these methods to post your comment:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: