Herald of spring


Ume(Japanese plum) blossoms are herald of spring.

Peculiarly when I see some crimson ones which are just at beginning to bloom, I cannot help imaging of them to start to set fire on the top branches of various sort of trees to open up one after another.





And in this season I remember this tanka poem in which the writer Fujiko Ishikawa(1933~ )expresses her excessive desire for seeing some crimson plum blossoms.

紅梅が見たしと思ふ　唐突にせつぱつまりし如くに見たし　石川不二子
(Abruptly a feeling came to me; an eager hope to see some red plum blossoms now.)

White plum blossoms seem to flourish more quietly.

Here is a plum garden which is nearby my living quarter, where various coloured plum blossoms can be seen.

These darkened trunks with bright blossoms remind me of a picture, one of Ukiyo-e

, by Hiroshige Utagawa.(1797~1858)(from website)



And the one by Van Gogh(1853~1890) being influenced with the former picture.(from website)





There are two types of plum garden; one is for pleasure of viewing flowers like this garden and the other is for gathering plum fruits as well as for flowers which has been done from olden days.





Toyohiro Utagawa(1773~1828)(picture from website)

Later I called in a park, man made but looks quite natural, being located not far from the plum garden.
I came here last spring as well, to see wild white plum blossoms that have another effect.

去年（こぞ）も来し疎林の奥の明るめり　一歳老いて咲ける白梅
I came to see you,

a wild plum tree

You brighten the depth of the bush just as the last year

despite of you're one year older

haricot

Birds

:::::::::::::::

This is the fourth time for me to visit Koya pond

（昆陽池）, in Itami city in Hyogo prefecture.

嘴を羽にうずk 嘴を羽に埋めて眠りたる鴨の群にも雪ふりきたり眠りいる鴨の群にも雪ふりきたり

There is snow falling
in canards' wings and feathering
when they are sleeping
with their nibs into their own wings

When I came here for the first time, there was snow fall, and a flock
of gulls, a sort of gull called yuri-kamome in Japanese, soared up into the gray sky all together suddenly.
The white plumage with faint gray parts mingling with snow flakes gave me a lasting impression.

This pond which was made under leadership of preast Gyoki over1,200 years ago,is a famous stopover for migratory birds now.

I have visited in cold season and saw various birds, gulls, cormorants, many sorts of ducks and geese, swans and so on here.
In spring, swans deposit their eggs and it is said that people can see some swans swim with their chicks in early summer.

the islands in the pond

Koya-pond has artistic islands in the midst of it. The shape, looks like Japanese archipelagos, is observed like the photo(by Wikipedia) shows from air plane which has got departure from Osaka International Airport(Itami Airport) that is located near the pond.

In dairy life I enjoy to see the birds which come to visit my yard.
A lot of bush near my residence gradually have decreased because of becoming cut-over, therefore the birds need to search for their food in the residential area.

I found this You tube,"El Cant des Ocells"「鳥の歌」 by Pablo Casals.
The plaintive and delicate melody by a cellist makes me think of birds' difficult and fragile lives.

Their lives are not easy.

The old man , in "The Old man and the Sea", recognises a bird came to be close to his vessel long time after when the shore became to be unseen.
He talks to the bird which teetered on a line for fishing, having gripped it with his feet without examining it well,
"It's steady.""It's too steady. You shouldn't be that tired after a windless night," said he.


The old man's mind keeps tense throughout the story like the fishing line which is an unwashed one in daylight and a phosphorescent one at night.

It was the moment when he talked to the bird was the moment when his mind winded down unusually in the story.

murmur of a river

murmur of a river

with

Happy New Year

暮れ近き小川の呟き聞きとめて急かるるこころ抱（いだ）き佇む

I alerted and stood still

with a mind tending to bustle

as I happened to listen to

murmur of a stream of the river

I composed this one just after I started to learn how to do. I was in late 30Th and it was necessary for me to share almost all of my time for family of seven. So, the moment for thinking about tanka was quite precious for me.

At that time I was passing along this river by bicycle, and today I came here alone on foot.
Appreciating to have enough time for myself, I looked at a row of cherry trees along the river.
These trees were planted by volunteers about ten years ago by the river Akishino, which will remind you of family name of Prince and Princess as well as a name of a temple.

Cherry trees without flowers nor leaves let their bark shine flashing back sun rays of January, and now that I look closer I saw many tiny blossom buds.

Before, I found a wooden plate hung in one of the trees with a tanka that read, the life of Harry Belafonte who is singing an old Japanese song, "sakura", and that of mine are valuable, sorrowful in a same way and both are irreplaceable.

(ただ一度生まれ来しなり「さくらさくら」歌うベラフォンテも我も悲しき)
　島田修二

What a shame that I can't recognise in which tree it was hung.


The stream of the river murmured.
" I have a flow, and so does time. Go slowly along the flow."


On my way home I saw trees rising up beneath the sky. And, New Year sky goes on forever above them.

Picture in my memory

The harvest season has finished here in Japan.

This is my deceased mother's work of embroidery,cross-stitch, during her late life.
I remembered that she made the stitch one by one sitting hunched up over the cloth. Her figure like this overlapped in my mind with the women who are gleaning crouching their back onto the field.

根つめて描（か）かれしならむ　腰かがめ女の指は落ち穂を掴む


It must be a pain taking labour

and the depiction, too

The women bending down

to do "Gleaning"

just have clutched some of the wheat-ears

The design of the embroidery is from a famous picture, "Gleaning"by Jean-Francois Millet.(1814-1875)



Regarding to Millet, there is an unforgettable article for me that said about his works. It was like this: Millet chose labour as his subject for his drawing and people in the Salon des Beaux Arts at that moment(19C ) astonished and rejected his works with sense of avertion, because such subject had never chosen by painters up to that time.


That description made me get a jolt, as I had thought works by Millet were in the category of classic paintings.
While new point of views and ideas as well as some technical innovation are required for artists in every genre, some unprecedented ones tend to be alienated.
It seems that Millet's ones were not exceptional, and it took long time to be finally accepted by the people in Salon des Beaux Arts.


He depicted scrupulously, as it is well known, the daily lives of farmers, their struggling with cattle, taking care of children by wives, and so on. These pictures make viewers feel his exact and warm eyes.

(image from Wikipedia) The first experience for me to see some showpiece was the one by him,
"The Angelus", not a genuine one but a copy in retrospect.

Despite the picture was filled with tranquillity, I certainly heard the evening bell, beeing overwelmed and seeing it.
I was the fourth grade student of elementary school, and the picture was hanging on a wall of a corridor that led to a music room.

Sound of Something

We are surrounded by so many kinds of sounds in our daily lives, rough ones, gentle ones, out of doors and in doors.
Besides, usually we are not conscious so much about the sounds we are familiar with.


踏切をわたり終えてもまだ残る
　　　　　　　　　 急に止みたるカンカンのおとIt ceased all of a sudden
and is still ringing in my ears
after I have done to cross over the rail road,
"kan kan kan...."
I came mind out the alarm signal of railroad crossing when I will cross over, after I read a short writing about James Kirkup (1918-2009), a writer,a poet and a translator who is famous in Japan for having translated many lyrical poets especially tanka, which has 31syllables in Japanese, into the same number of syllables English verses.
He is known as a writer of haiku and tanka, as well.

It said that he was very sensuous about various sounds and when he came to visit Japan he was particularly interested in the sound of the alarm signal, during his sojourn.

In the short verse, tanka which I wrote above, I tried to express the alarm sound as "kan kan", but actually I have no way to know how he did listen to the sound for himself.

In fact, it is said that the sound of a barking dog has variant depending upon countries.
At any rate,why the barking dog sounds differently country to country?
As the difference between countries is self-evident concept, then, it maybe that each person could hear a specific sound differently.
Though it is a little side journey,once my dog cried "Gu-wan", staring at me, at the exact time for food and it surprised me because I heard it as "gohan"which means food.

Well,back to the topic of sound, some sound is often expressed by some onomatopoeia on writing.
Verses are belonged to comparatively short genre of writing, and if the onomatopoeia is ordinary one, the verse would be enable to escape mediocrity.
So, some uncommon onomatopoeia is quite important for writing not least for verses.
What does seem sure is that alarm signal was curious thing for Kirkup, for his sense, as a writer and a poet.

I'm afraid of his might have been bothered by a feeling of strangeness, if he read such a banal onomatopoeia as "kan kan"in a tanka verse.
Aside from my insensitivity to sound, the sound of alarm signal in Japan must be yet too familiar with me.


I really wish I could find out some specific sound for me somewhere in some country, someday.

by Kelly's Pics(haydillgirl), Flickr

この森に弾痕のある樹あらずや記憶の茂み暗みつつあり

Within this forest,is there not a tree that bears

the mark of a bullet

In thickets of memory

undergrowth keeps darkening

from"Thickets of memory" by Fumi Saito 斎藤　史(1909-2002)
translated by J. Kirkup

A Pair of Blue Eyes

Two years ago, on a fine day in autumn, I read an excerpt of a novel in the Reading Class I'm belonged to.
It was "A Pair of Blue Eyes" by Thomas Hardy, and was introduced as a representative part where a man called Knight is suspending on a cliff.
It was literally "suspense", and it led me to read the story this summer.

The heroin, Elfride, she encounters two men in the remote countryside where she and her father are dwelling. She meets Stephen and then Knight there, and she consequently put her heart and soul into them.
A little immature romance of her with Stephen is somehow in the shadow of her mother who did elopement and left her and her father when Elfride was still a little girl.
She meets Knight after Stephen's departure having promised with her of their marriage, and this image of their love affair occasionally comes into her mind despite her passionate love and her admiration for Knight, and it makes him leave her with mistakenly-thought.

She makes up her mind to get marry for her family and her kin, at last, and moves to London to live with her gentle husband.

However, London is the place where she can't get rid of her memories with the two men; she once went to London with Stephen to proceed their marriage secretly but as soon as she reached London she went back out of fear, and later she tried to visit Knight in London and it was also in vain.

Before long, she began to suffer from her illness and her life was cut short by it. And, a stout name plate on her coffin was left.

Without knowing this novel, the words" pair of blue eyes" remind me of famous pictures of women depicted by Amedeo Modigliani.

When I went to see the exhibition that showed the pictures by the both,Amedeo and his wife Jeanne, I saw a portrait of Jeanne with a pair of blue eyes which look like seeing nothing, painted by Amedeo, being exhibited next to the one of Amedeo with his eyes shut as he is sleeping or meditating, painted by Jeanne.

ウイ(是）としか言えぬと妻を蔑める映画の場面をおもい出だしぬ

I remembered a scene of an old film,
"Great! You cannot say anything but Yes."
He blamed his wife
like he laughed at himself

Although Amedeo was a gifted artist, his art did not see the light of day during his life.
Jeanne supports him well as his wife and as a model for his painting and very understanding his art as a painter, but he sometimes treats her coldly not from the depth of his mind but out of his misery, in an old film that I saw long time ago.
I composed this verse remembering one scene of the film that depicted Modigliani's singular life as an artist, "Les Amants de Montparnasse"(Montparnasse 19)「モンパルナスの灯」, acted by Gerard Philipe and Anouk Aimee.

The colour of the sky became deeper as autumn progresses.
Walking beneath the sky, I feel familiar with the two women, Elfride and Jeanne, with a pair of blue eyes.
Autumn makes people sentimental.

by SunnyFlo, Flickr

Cheer up or cool down?



countdown for New Year in Sydney
image from　wikipedia


In recent years, festivals of countdown for coming new year are held worldwide. And rocket type of fireworks are essential for the events.
As Japanese archipelagos are located in the Northern Hemisphere, such events as countdown are necessarily took place in winter.

Besides, fireworks have been one of typical entertainments in summer of Japan, and they are usually done by the waterside, especially along the river in the evening. Eventually people enjoy these sparkling variegated works with these reflections on water. Breeze which flows across the river and the reflected colour make people feel cooler than the real temperature of midsummer evening.

As far as I see some new year countdown on TV and when I compare the shown fireworks with Japanese ones in summer season, the latters ones are relatively sparse as many other Japanese arts, drawing, poetry, and calligraphy for example, would be so.

幾重にも花火ひらきて散りながら列なる音が遅れて届く

Sounds reached me

a little bit later

of the consecutive bloom

and of the fade of fireworks

Regarding to history of them, there is the fact that workmen for bullet making had no job in the period since Tokugawa family dominated after some big civil wars and took the situation of national isolation. Meanwhile these men started to make fireworks with materials for bullets of matchlocks, and skilled up about it with their own designs.

Fireworks festivals were good opportunities for them to show their improved skill, and viewers called out the name of their favorite group where proficient workmen work for, Tamaya , Kagiya for example,to encourage and applause them. This aspect they compete their skill and design at festivals still remains.

In this way, Japanese fireworks have two faces, to cheer up and to cool down. And, generally they are rather cool to be seen compared to ones on new year day which make people's hearts warmer. In cotton kimono with a round fan to see them make cooler, they say, and eating shave ice definitely makes us cool, I would like to say.

from miwa**