Kokinshu #147

[lnhammer]

(Topic unknown.)

    Cuckoo, because you
sing in so many hamlets
    I am finding that,
even though I long for you,
I now despise you as well.

—27 September 2011

(Original author unknown.) Still in villages, but there's more than one -- implying a lower, more settled area. In Tales of Ise, this poem is sent by a man with a painting of a cuckoo to a woman he and others are courting (we're not told whether this works). The slightly confused syntax mirrors the original's inverted sentence order.


hototogisu
na ga naku sato no
amata areba
nao utomarenu
omou mono kara

---L.