Basho's Journeys, Mine Poem by Dennis Ryan

Friday afternoon, April 5,2019 at 2: 14 p.m.; Friday morning, April 19 at 10: 15 a.m.

'It was early on the morning of March the twenty-seventh that I took to the road... My friends had got together the night before, and they all came with me on the boat to keep me company for the first few miles.'
- Matsuo Basho, Oku No Hoso Michi (The Narrow Road to the Deep Interior)

Yuku haru ya
tori naki uo no
me wa namida
- Matsuo Basho (1644-1694) , haiku from Oku No Hoso Michi

Passing spring
birds cry, tears
in the fishes' eyes
- my translation

One thing we know for certain:
people living and dead preoccupied him,
and he traveled far afoot to meet them
or to remember them where they had lived,
died, travelled— the House of Fallen Persimmons,
where Kyorai was a lazy man, and Shiogoshi,
where Saigyo had written a famous tanka:
Basho rested his road-weary legs in the shade
of that same willow where Saigyo once did.
Places, the people there mattered.Like him,
I know the feeling of being in an empty house.