"Bear them we can, and if we can we must. / Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale."

The more of the Kokinshu I translate, the more I appreciate how an anthology editor's choices create another story, the one assembled out of the collection. Not that I haven't been doing that myself with mixes for a couple decades, but being forced to go through the grass-level details at a slow foreign-language-learner's pace has made clearer how the selection of what to include and exclude as well as arrangement affects the whole.

So I had a fair bit of fun this week hosting poetry this week, as this gave me the chance to create a sort of mini-anthology of poems talking to each other across times and traditions:

"Hyla Brook," Robert Frost
Kokinshu 53, Ariwara no Narihira
The chestnut casts his flambeaux, A. E. Housman
"A Quoi Bon Dire," Charlotte Mew
"The Inlaid Zither," Li Shangyin
Kokinshu 658, Ono no Komachi
There's a certain Slant of light, Emily Dickinson

Offered here on the chance someone might enjoy the resulting story.

---L.