Short Poems

For three days winds and rain raged and we stayed on the miserable mountain:
Fleas, lice — a horse pisses right by my pillow

The sky in the middle of the fourth month was still hazy, and the moon of the fleeting short night quite alluring, the mountains dark with young leaves. It was time for cuckoos to appear, calling, when the eastern clouds began to turn white beyond the sea:
Fishermen's faces were seen first, then the poppy flowers

A cuckoo fades away, and in its direction, a single island

Wanting to see the " first snow " at my grass hut, whenever I was elsewhere and the sky became cloudy, I would hurry home — I did it so many times. But one twelfth month, on the eighth, for the first time it snowed [while I was home], and I was overjoyed:
First snow: luckily I find myself residing in my own hut

As I climbed out of the boat at the place called Senju I was overwhelmed by the thought of the three thousand li lying before me and shed tears of parting in the illusory world:
Departing spring: birds cry and in the eyes of fish, tears

Tired of sleeping on a grass pillow, I went out on the beach while it was still dark:
Daybreak: a white fish is white, just an inch

Congratulations on a new house:
A good house: sparrows delight in the millet behind the back door

Composed while ill:
Falling ill on a journey, my dreams run round a withered field

On a road that leads to Otsu, as I came over the mountain path:
Coming by a mountain path — elegant somehow, violets

Cold night:
A pot splits, and the night ice wakes me

To have a noontime rest I sat in a shop for travelers:
Azaleas arranged, and by them a woman slivers dried cod