ENVOYS
On an evening when the spring mists
Trail over the wide sea,
And sad is the voice of the cranes
I think of my far-off home.
Thinking of home,
Sleepless I sit,
The cranes call amid the shore reeds,
Lost in the mists of spring.
Ōtomo Yakamochi
An elegy on the impermanence of human life
We are helpless before time
Which ever speeds away.
And pains of a hundred kinds
Pursue us one after another.
Maidens joy in girlish pleasures,
With ship-borne gems on their wrists,
And hand in hand with their friends;
But the bloom of maidenhood,
As it cannot be stopped,
Too swiftly steals away.
When do their ample tresses
Black as a mud-snail’s bowels
Turn white with the frost of age?
Whence come those wrinkles
Which furrow their rosy cheeks?
The lusty young men, warrior-like,
Bearing their sword blades at their waists,
In their hands the hunting bows,
And mounting their bay horses,
With saddles dressed with twill,
