Short Poems

24th. Clear. Frost.
Around seven in the evening, on Fifth Street in Aioi-cho where I live, someone stabbed a blind masseur with a spear and ran away. Some of us immediately gathered around the victim and asked, " Where do you live? " But he barely finished saying, " I live in Yokoami " before he died. Since this past spring, I'd heard rumors that this kind of outlandish thing happened from time to time, but when I saw it right in front of my eyes, I felt terror, pity, and bitterness, and a chill ran down my spine.

The flock of gulls, voices swallowed in the dark sea, must be already rising to their feet on the face of the sea far in the darkness.
The lamp was at least illuminating the rain at the bow.

A frisky lamb
And a frisky child
Playing their pranks
In a cowslip meadow:
The sky all blue
And the air all mild
And the fields all sun
And the lanes half shadow.

All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist;
Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by and by.

Gryll eates, but ne're sayes Grace; To speak the troth,
Gryll either keeps his breath to coole his broth;
Or else because Grill's roste do's burn his Spit,
Gryll will not therefore say a Grace for it.

Gone she is a long, long way,
But she has decreed a day
Back to come, (and make no stay.)
So we keepe till her returne
Here, her ashes, or her Urne.

Go I must; when I am gone,
Write but this upon my Stone;
Chaste I liv'd, without a wife,
That's the Story of my life.
Strewings need none, every flower
Is in this word, Batchelour.

First, April, she with mellow showers
Opens the way for early flowers;
Then after her comes smiling May,
In a more sweet and rich array;
Next enters June, and brings us more
Gems than those two that went before:
Then, lastly, July comes, and she
More wealth brings in than all those three.

Fair was the dawn, and but e'en now the skies
Showed like to cream inspired with strawberries;
But on a sudden all was changed and gone
That smiled in that first-sweet complexion.
Then thunder-claps and lightning did conspire
To tear the world, or set it all on fire.
What trust to things below, whenas we see,
As men, the heavens have their hypocrisy?

Dew sat on Julia's hair,
And spangled too,
Like leaves that laden are
With trembling Dew:
Or glitter'd to my sight,
As when the beams
Have their reflected light
Danc'd by the streams.