Tatsuji Miyoshi

Here is the place where your eyes rested
Upon the sparrows flitting through the pine boughs

Here is the place where your body rested
...

But these feelings feel like spring
The old man mutters to himself
On a flagstone in a burned-out field
That is what one particular man and his fate muttered
...

The day has ended

The day has ended. Fill your
own sake-cup, the rest is all in vain
Sing to yourself your own verse
...

With evening
A beautiful adolescent returns home
Leaving the monastery gate
...

an ant goes
dragging a butterfly wing
ah
like a yacht!
...

artless are the notes
your childlike fingers strum
the koto music of Japan soars to the sky
listening to you play a melody
...

in the middle of the night before a collection of my poetry comes out
solely due to my limited talent
may my verse
be an inception
...

he day is ending
out of a monastery gate
an alluring youth is coming home
...

you were here looking up
at the pine branches where pine sparrows flit about

you were here resting on the withered grass
the grass remains, still withered
...

After we were defeated at war
ten million babies were born
...

Yet, a stirring in me seems like Spring,
mumbles an old man to himself
so mumbles fate as it embraces its own lonesome knees
on a flat stone in a burnt-over field
...

Where are you from, traveler from afar,
resting in treetops bared by the winter?
The treetops are lithe
...

The deer was held in a dark shed, tied by the horns with a hempen rope. He sat neatly, gracefully, where he couldn't see anything, his blue eyes clear. A single taro was lying there.
...

A water wheel by the mill. A lone camellia tree in the shade of a thicket.
A butterfly flutters down to a newly made rut, moving in different directions,
to the quiet rhythms of its wings - it arrests me
"Here we are, dear, the railroad crossing . . ." I pause
...

As his son was to start school
Dad wrote poems everyday
The poems turned into a cap, a satchel
...

Call my name please
please call me by my childhood name
pity me and call me just once more by my childhood name
...

Lamb,
you prick up your ears to the blue of the sea, leap over the surrounding fence
trot along the sand dunes, and romp with your shadow
My song is this morning's new-born lamb
...

For the inaugural issue of the poetry quarterly Kurumi (Walnut)
Its shell is tough, yet
As I roll it in my finger tips I hear a voice
The voice is faint, and seems to laugh
...