Annual Review – MUTTS Daily Email
Source: MUTTS Daily Email
Posts Tagged ‘ new year ’
May the newest new
year of the beginning of
the spring just begun
today like the falling snow
the more heap up our blessings.– Yakamochi
Love as saying says
is a most excellent name
in terms of saying
what otherwise won’t be grasped –
my body now become it.– Yakamochi
My most loved tanka are by the Japanese poet of The MAN’YŌSHŪ (万葉集), or Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, Yakamochi, who lived from 718 to 785. It helps to know that the Japanese until recently followed the lunar calendar so the first day of the new year was also the first day of spring. Often, spring contained snow (like life, huh?).
The MAN’YŌSHŪ (万葉集), or Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, is the oldest existing anthology of Japanese poetry, having been compiled around 759 C.E. It consists mainly of 4,500 short poems or tanka, written and collected from every class of society, many by women, over a period of 440 years. Tanka traditionally consist of 31 syllables in 5 lines of a 5-7-5-7-7 pattern — easy to count on the hand and so to memorize. The MAN’YŌSHŪ poets experienced interconnection with all life forms, organic and inorganic, as an inherent quality of their daily spiritual and cultural lives and expressed in Shintoism as well as poetry. When they spoke-wrote poetry it was experienced as naturally akin to a clap of thunder, a raindrop, the cry of the hototogisu, or an in- and out-breath. – Donna Fleischer
May the newest new
year of the beginning of
the spring just begun
today like the falling snow
the more heap up our blessings.
~ Yakamochi
[(4516) . . . dated on New Year’s Day 759 . . .
This is the final poem in the Manyoshu.
In the lunar calendar the first day of the year
inaugurates spring. Tanka translation &
annotation by Cid Corman, Peerless Mirror,
Firefly Press, Cambridge, MA, 1981.]
New Year’s dream
my soul as a child’s face
runs on sunrays
— Ecaterina Zazu Neagoe
(Bucharest, Romania)