“the color of heavy hemlocks / Came striding / And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.”

[larryhammer]

For Poetry Monday:

Basho, David Young

Each poem is a tiny door,
or better still,
a window.

Light as a snowflake,
slippery as a whale,
poised as a candle,
silent as an orchid.

We’ve walked a long way together.
Somewhere ahead of us
a horse whinnies,
a crow calls,
a beetle’s becoming a firefly.

The horse and the crow are a poem.

The firefly lights our way.


Young (b. 1936) has translated Basho, as well as Du Fu and Petrarch.

---L.

Subject quote from Domination of Black, Wallace Stevens.