Short Poems

Now lilies blow upon the windy height,
Now flowers the pansy kissed by tender rain,
Narcissus builds his house of self-delight
And Love's own fairest flower blooms again;
Vainly your gems, O meadows, you recall;
One simple girl breathes sweeter than you all.

The rain it raineth on the just
And also on the unjust fella;
But chiefly on the just, because
The unjust steals the just's umbrella.

The shyp that late I sawe beare loftie sayle,
Deepe lanched in the waues of waters wilde:
Whose courage stowte I deemde no storme might quayle,
When I her viewde so fast and fyrmely fielde.
With tempest tost, is forst now sayle to streeke,
And in her prime doth houering harbour seeke.

Planting rice seedlings
the hands—in the distant past pressing
the grass of longing

The passions that we fought with and subdued
Never quite die. In some maimed serpent's coil
They lurk, ready to spring and vindicate
That power was once our torture and our lord.

Once when I a spider had kill'd,
Then methought: was't right or wrong?
That we both to these times should belong,
This had God in His goodness will'd.

Oft in her Glass the musing Shepherd spies
The headlong Mountains and the downward Skies,
The watry Landskip of the pendant Woods,
And absent Trees that tremble in the Floods;
In the clear azure Gleam the Flocks are seen,
And floating Forests paint the Waves with Green.

O rough sea! Waves on waves do darkling rise,
The galaxy reaching down where Sado lies.

Motley this congregation is, for, lo!
At the communion kneel both friend and foe.

mosses in bloom—
the Buddha fading away
from the stone's surface