I travel back 300 years before my lifetime. I move in time but not in space staying rooted to this spot on earth. Who lives on this soil? What grows here? If I could, I would see the whole story unfold from the beginning. We are specks, our history a blip in billions of years.
full rainfall at last
how long will these trees thrive
on rock and clay?
©️2018 Ontheland
~
hamaguri no futami ni wakare yuku aki zo
a clam
torn from its shell
departing autumn©Matsuo Basho, translated by Jane Reichhold
….this is the last verse in Basho’s ‘Oku no Hosomichi’ ‘The Narrow Road to the Far North’. Because there are several word plays at work here, the Japanese maintain that there is no way for the poem to be rendered into another language.
~ Chèvrefeuille in Heeding Haiku with Chèvrefeuille, February 21, 2018, Revise it
The challenge here was to “revise” Basho’s haiku even though in its original Japanese there are many wordplays. After reading Chevrefeuille’s post (link above) and much head scratching, I came up with this simple version:
Beach chestnuts
leaving Futami
at my journey’s end
©2018 Ontheland
Futami, a word used in the Japanese version, is the name of the port where the Wedded Rocks, shown in the photo, are located. Beach chestnuts is an alternative meaning of the words in the first line and possibly could be an image representing the Wedded Rocks.
