Kokinshu #357

A poem written on a folding screen with pictures of the four seasons when the Principal Handmaiden celebrated the fortieth birthday of Minister of the Right Fujiwara [no Sadakuni].

    While I pick young greens
on Kasuga Plain, my heart
    is celebrating
your ten-thousand ages --
the gods themselves must know this!

—30 January 2013

(Original by Sosei.) Poems 357–363 are all for the same screen -- this and the next implicitly for the spring panel(s). The Principal Handmaiden was Fujiwara no Michiko, a younger sister of Sadakuni (866–906), who celebrated his 40th birthday in 905 -- other siblings include Yoruka (see #80) and Sadakata (see #231). Sadakuni was, incidentally, another minister involved in the 903 ouster of Sugewara no Michizane (see #272), and his death the year after this celebration was also attributed to Michizane's vengeful spirit. Much of which is irrelevant to the poem, but I still find this stuff interesting. For Kasuga Plain and picking young greens, see #17–18. Given the Fujiwara clan shrine was in Kasuga, it may have been the clan's singular god who's supposed to know this.


kasugano ni
wakana tsumitsutsu
yorozuyo o
iwau kokoro wa
kami zo shiruramu

---L.