Wind Blown Clouds Book

By the Toko Mountain in Omi
There flows the Isaya, River of Doubt.
I doubt whether nowadays
You, too, still think of me?
----




(Prince Otsu and Lady Ishikawa)

Waiting for you,
In the dripping dew of the hill I stood,
-weary and wet
With the dripping dew of the hill.

- By the Prince


Would I had been, beloved,
The dripping dew of the hill,
That wetted you
While for me you waited.

- By the Lady
----



Tonight the autumn moon shines
The moon that shone a year ago,
But my wife and I who watched it then together
Are divided by ever-widening wastes of time.

When leaving my love behind in the Hikite mountains
Leaving her there in her grave,
I walk down the mountain path,
I feel not like one living.
----



(Lamenting his own fate as he was about to die in the land of Iwami)

All unaware, it may be,
That I lie in Kamo-yama,
Pillowed on a rock,
She is waiting now - my wife
Waiting for my return.
----



The great earth itself
Might be exhausted by digging,
But of love alone in this world
Could we never reach the end.
----



If the thunder rolls for a while
And the sky is clouded, bringing rain,
Then you will stay beside me.
----



Slight not these flowers!
Each single petal contains
A hundred words of mine.
----



How I waste and waste away
With love forlorn
I who have thought myself
A strong man

Rather than that I should thus pine for you,
Would I had been transmuted
Into a tree or a stone,
Nevermore to feel the pangs of love.
----



(Suffering from old age and prolongedillness, and thinking of his children)

So long as lasts the span of life,
We wish for peace and comfort
With no evil and no mourning,
But life is hard and painful.
As the common saying has it,
Bitter salt is poured into the smarting wound,
Or the burdened horse is packed with an upper load, Illness shakes my old body with pain
All day long I breathe and grief
And sigh throughout the night.
For long years my illness lingers,
I grieve and groan month after month,
And though I would rather die, I cannot,
and leave my children noisy like the flies of May. Whenever I watch them
My heart burns within.
And tossed this way and that,
I weep aloud.
----



(On rain)

Let no rain fall to drench me through;
I wear beneath my clothes
The keepsake of my loved one.
----



(On the koto)

When I take the koto, sobs break forth;
Can it be that in its hollow space
The spirit of my wife is hiding?
----



(Referring to the grass)

My love-thoughts these days
Come thick like the summer grass
Which soon as cut and raked
Grows wild again
----



(Referring to night)

Though men say
An autumn night is long,
It is all too brief
For unloading my heart
Of all its love
----



I will not comb my morning hair:
Your loving arm, my pillow,
Has lain under it