English

My caution
is quite defeated
by my yearning for you:
if we can but meet,
let happen what may! The woman retreated to her rooms, but since the man went to her as usual, unconcerned that others might see, the woman was distressed and went back to her own home. Finding this not a deterrent but, rather, a convenience, the man began visiting her at home. Everyone heard about this and laughed. When the groundskeepers saw him return to the palace in the mornings, he would take his shoes, throw them in toward the back, and enter.

In the past, a woman who loved love wondered how she might meet a man of deep feeling. Since she had no way of coming out and saying so, she made up a story about a dream. She called three of her children and told them about it. Two of them made unfeeling responses and dismissed it. The third son, detecting its import, said, " A good man will surely come to you, " and with that the woman looked very pleased.

Since last I saw you
my height
has surpassed
that of the well-curb
where we measured it. The girl replied:

This parted hair
I once compared with yours
now falls past my shoulders.
Who should tie it up
if not you? After many such exchanges, they were finally able to marry as they wished.

I long to find a path
to the depths of Mount Shinobu
that I might fathom
the secrets
of another's heart.
The woman thought it a very fine poem but was ashamed to imagine what might be revealed if he could indeed see into the heart of a rustic like herself.

Do not burn, today,
this field of Musashi!
Fresh as young grass
my spouse is hidden here
as I am hiding, too. When they heard this, they took the woman and led the pair off together.

Since I have a wife
familiar to me as the hem
of a well-worn robe,
I think sadly of how far
I have traveled on this journey.
When he composed this, all of them shed tears on their dried rice until it swelled with the moisture.

Is there no moon?
Is the spring
not the spring of the past?
I alone
am as I was . . . . With the first faint glow of dawn, he went home, still weeping.

I spent the night
neither awake
nor yet asleep
and the day gazing at the rain
thinking of spring.

Like a patterned robe
dyed with young lavender
from the fields of Kasuga,
my tangled feelings
know no bounds.
He wrote this rapidly, in a single line. He must have been very pleased with himself. The poem is of the same tenor as the following:

Whose fault is it
that my feelings are tangled
as the dyed patterns
on cloth from Michinoku?
Surely not mine . . . .

Coldly, sadly, descends
The autumn evening. The field
Strewn with its dark yellow drifts
Of withered leaves, and the elms,
Fade into dimness apace,
Silent; hardly a shout
From a few boys late at their play!
The lights come out in the street,
In the schoolroom windows; but cold,
Solemn, unlighted, austere,
Through the gathering darkness, arise
The chapel-walls, in whose bound
Thou, my father! art laid.

There thou dost lie, in the gloom
Of the autumn evening. But ah!
That word, gloom , to my mind