So I don't really write clappers.
And it's OK to wait until the end,
really, because I know not every poem evokes
clapping, hollering, whooping, floor stamping.
No.
So you don't-- please don't feel obliged.
I take silence as a high compliment
whether it's deserved or not.
So I thought, again, both in honor of National Poetry
Month and the lineage of poets that the Tucson Poetry
Center honors so deeply and that we are all part of,
I'm going to start with a few of the translated poems
from the Japanese women a thousand years ago.
I could spend the whole evening talking about them
and reading their work, and I must not do that.
So The Ink Dark Moon is the name of the book.
If you want to know more about the background and more
of their poems, it's, I'm sure, in the library.
So this first set of poems is by Ono no Komachi
who lived in the ninth century and served
at the court of Heian era Japan.
The only example we have in world history
until recently a great golden age created by women writers.
They wrote much of love.
They wrote much of loss.
And there is an underpinning of Buddhist worldview
in their work.
All the poems are five lines long,
tanka form, older than haiku, 31 syllables in the Japanese,
but not in the English.
"Did he appear because I fell asleep thinking of him?
If only I'd known I was dreaming,
I'd never have wakened."
"This pine tree by the rock must have its memories too.
After a thousand years, see how its branches
lean toward the ground."
"How invisibly it changes color in this world,
the flower of the human heart."
And the last one of hers--
I'm sorry I'm skipping all the stories.
The stories help, but this one is
thought to have been from her old age
when she was long gone from the court, an unrecognized crone
living in a thatched roof leaking hut outside the city
walls.
But they sort of thought the old lady knew something
about poetry.
And meanwhile, Ono no Komachi, as a poet, was quite famous,
but nobody knew it was her.
"This abandoned house shining in the mountain village,
how many nights has the autumn moon spent here?"