Page:Anthology of Japanese Literature.pdf/43

Thick with spring leaves. Abundant as their greenery
Was my love. On her leaned my soul.
But who evades mortality?
One morning she was gone, flown like an early bird.
Clad in a heavenly scarf of white,
To the wide fields where the shimmering kagerō rises
She went and vanished like the setting sun.

The little babe—the keepsake
My wife has left me—
Cries and clamors.
I have nothing to give; I pick up the child
And clasp it in my arms.

In our chamber, where our two pillows lie,
Where we two used to sleep together,
Days I spend alone, broken-hearted:
Nights I pass, sighing till dawn.

Though I grieve, there is no help;
Vainly I long to see her.
Men tell me that my wife is
In the mountains of Hagai—
Thither I go,
Toiling along the stony path;
But it avails me not,
For of my wife, as she lived in this world,
I find not the faintest shadow.


ENVOYS

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.