song of autumn

In these two weeks the temperature became moderate so rapidly,
but again autumn seems to hesitate to visit at a gallop.

However, the weather is suitable for walking even for a people like me who is not sportive.

Walking without worry about insignificant

and small things is refreshing, even more so in clear air under the deep sky.

I walked to a park, admiring the typical autumn flower, cosmos,

and long-termed booming of abelias, faintly reddish leaves and already ripe nuts of dog wood tree.

But I leave something to be desired.

After a rainy night, we had a calmer and more placid morning.

I remembered about the field I happened to see through the train window when I went to Kyoto the other day.

It was close to the border between Nara and Kyoto, more rural than the area

where I live and I thought the field invited me.

Perhaps it reminded me of my childhood, though the area was new to me.

When I was a schoolgirl I walked to and from school seeing such fields.

Some wild flowers and some abandoned ones, spreading golden paddy fields as background, are nostalgic.

I was fulfilled my senses gradually.

When I saw cluster amaryllis I remembered that I was taught they were poisonous, and even that took me back.

       

At night I found this tanka in one of my favourite books, "In Thickets of Memory", by Fumi Saito.

おのれ孤りおのれの毒を食みて生き女いささか酔ふことありし　斉藤　史

Living on her own,

staying alive by feeding

on her own poison,

a woman at times displayed

some slightly toxic symptoms

translated by James Kirkup $ Makoto Tamaki

Cluster amaryllis has another name, Spider lily.

Remembering the crimson I saw in daytime, I thought of another aspect of life of the bright flower.