The second poet in the book, Izumi Shikibu,
wrote around the turn of the millennium
around the year 1000.
If any of you know the world's earliest novel,
The Tale Of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu,
they served at court at the same time.
Shikibu is a title.
It's basically could be translated as "lady."
Lying alone, my black hair tangled,
uncombed, I long for the one who touched it first.
Why haven't I thought of it before?
This body, remembering yours, is the keepsake you left.
In this world, love has no color, yet how deeply
my body is stained by yours.
And I was thinking of stained glass windows.
Stained is a difficult word, but dyed also
has another connotation.
In between the two, I went for the stained glass windows.
These are all co- translations done
with a collaborator, a Japanese born,
Mariko Aratani came to this country when she was 27,
and also loved these early poems.
I wanted to give you one taste of the women's other side.
They weren't always sitting around longing.
So the men would come to the women's home after dark.
It was a time of great freedom for women.
Again, more so than has been seen until, you know,
20th century culture.
The men would come.
They would have exchanged poems, which
would have told them whether they were welcome
or not to come.
And when they left before dawn because there
was a convention of secrecy, poems
would be exchanged afterwards as well.
But in this case of this poem, it
was Shikibu who went to her lover's home,
and this was the poem that she wrote.
Returning home near dawn after a night away,
I used to say, how poetic, but now I
know this dawn rising men do is merely tiresome.
[LAUGHTER]
This one is quite certainly a poem of Buddhist understanding.
The moon in Japanese poetry can mean many things.
It can mean the fullness of something,
but it can also be an image of Buddhist awakening.
I cannot say which is which, the glowing plum blossom is
the spring night's moon.
So a poem about no separation between awakening
and the transient beauty of any moment.
I'll just give you a last poem by her.
I'm sorry.
I really would like to spend the whole evening reading
their poems.
This one, Shikibu is known-- she would go to Buddhist
monasteries and practice.
There are poems about that, and this
is the one, which according to legend,
was supposed to have been written
on her deathbed sent to the priest who was her teacher.
The way I must enter leads through darkness to darkness.
Oh, moon above the mountain's rim,
please shine a little further on my path.
So that's a taste of 1,000-year-old poems.
Falling out of it-- this is the original paperback.
It just fell out of its cover.
So there we go.