Ten Poems in Honor of Female Japanese Poets

Full description of the photo above

“Court Woman at her Desk with Poem Cards,” Woodblock print (surimono); ink and color on paper by Kubo Shunman, Edo period 1795. Made available by the Metropolitan Museum of Art under its Open Access program for CC0 unrestricted use

Ten Poems

Ichi —

Swift brush in dark ink

Flowing tendrils of beauty

The girl is not of this world

Ni —

Princess Shinshi’s tears

Flow from yesterday’s mountains

mina kanashi

San —

Daini’s wind blows

Still in her constant resolve

Love knows no boundaries

Shi –

Love never changes

Izumi’s wayward lover

No diff’rent than now

Go –

Her face is so sad

The cruelties that love brings

Tameko’s heart breaks

Roku –

Alone in her bed

She hears a mosquito fly

His buzz makes her cry

Sichi –

Beneath the spring rains

Her soft hair flows blue and red

Golden waves of grain

Hachi –

Now she is so young

In Kannon’s mercy she is

Old lady to be

Kyuu —

This daughter-in-law

May one day mother a son

And he will marry

Juu —

Her hot blood courses

Through vibrant limbs of ivory

Do not fear her love

***

Notes

• First note: I learned to count to 10 in Japanese when I took Jiu Jitsu for a while as a young woman. Forgive me if I have used the number forms incorrectly — it’s all I know.
• Second Note: The Japanese must be commended for being one of the first cultures to accept and even laud their female writers. In fact, the first acknowledged novel ever written down, The Tale of Genji, was written by a Japanese woman, Murasaki Shikibu.
• Third Note: I took an excellent and fascinating class in Japanese religion at Arizona State University in the early 2000s. It was by default a class in Japanese culture. It was in this course that I first encountered the writings of these Japanese women.
• Fourth Note: this series was inspired by a poetry prompt on MySpace. The prompt was a painting of a Japanese girl by a contemporary artist. The image was lost when I downloaded my works from MS, and of course, disappeared from MS when the site changed into the monster it is today. Of course, I would not be able to post that painting here anyway due to copyright issues.

Explanatory Notes:

Ichi — This is the girl in the painting

Ni — Shinshi — 14th-century princess and poet who wrote a portion of the Fūgashi (Collection of Elegance), an unorthodox form of imperial anthology commissioned by Empress Eifuku Mon-in and her son, Hanazono. The form was begun by the Empress’ husband, Emperor Fushimi. Mina kanashi is a line from her poem “Staking One’s Life on Love,” which translates as “all seem sad to me.”

Here is the full piece: The sky’s color/even the sight of the trees-/all seem sad to me/when life itself seems to hang/in the balance of my thoughts. (In Japanese: sora no iro/kusaki o miu mo/mina kanashi/inochi ni kakuru/mono o omoeba)

San — Daini — Daini no Sammi, an early 11th-century poet, daughter of poet (and author of The Tale of Genji) Murasaki Shikibu.

Shi — Lady Izumi Shikibu was a Heian Period (11th century) poet in the salon of Empress Akiko and a contemporary of Murasaki Shikibu and Daini no Sammi. Lady Izumi was notorious for her many lovers, of whom she wrote many poems.

Go — Tameko of the Second Rank wrote sometime between 1252 and 1316. She was the sister of poet Kyōgoku Tamekan, compiler of Emperor Fushimi’s commissioned poetic sequence Gyokūyoshū. This piece refers to a poem by Tameko taken from her love poems to be included in Empress Eifuku’s Fūgashi.

Roku — This piece hearkens to a poem by Kawai Shigetsu, a 17th & 18th-century woman who, once widowed, became a Buddhist nun and a student/patron of Basho. In a piece written about a year after she was widowed, she hears the buzzing of a lonely mosquito and imagines that he is looking for his mate.

Sichi –This was inspired by a poem by Chiyojo, an 18th-century poet and nun. In her time, Chiyojo was renowned for her work, though modern critics declaim her as trite.

Hachi — The original painting used as a prompt recalled an 18th-century comic Uta which looks like it could have been written by a woman; however, because the original creators of Senryu did not attach their names to their work, it is difficult to know. Kannon is the Japanese Buddhist “Goddess of Mercy.” Her Chinese counterpart is known as Kwan-Yin.

Here is the English translation of the poem that inspired this piece: My, but you speak the truth/my, but you speak the truth/out of ten of us/Nine will be “the old lady,”/That’s life for a woman.

Kyuu — This piece is written as an outright link to an 18th-century comic Uta piece, which, much like the one above, might have been written by a woman.

Here is the original in English: The mother-in-law/takes revenge for her own time/as daughter-in-law.

Juu — This piece honors the work of 19th/20th-century poet Yosano Akiko, whose sensuous and often explicit poetry created a sensation in her time.

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This series was first published on MySpace in 2010 as a result of a photo prompt. It has appeared in Bouncin and Behavin Poems on Medium, and is included in my poetry collection Perfect, Almost: Writings from the Early Social Networking Years (2013), available on Amazon.