Basho

By Basho
Translated by Sam Hamill

Summer grasses:
all that remains of great soldiers'
imperial dreams.

From "The Essential Basho" Shambala: 1999

Today I was on Route 104 returning home and the bus went by the bus stop for the National Cemetery and in the covered bus stop was a woman with a baby in her lap. The woman's face at first was very impassive as she sat there alone and then her face collapsed into tears and she hugged her ten month child.

I thought about the poem above written by Basho so many years ago and wondered if the young woman was one of the ones whose husband had been buried in the National Cemetery recently because of the sinking of the ship a few months ago by North Korea.

That baby will never know his father and the young woman will raise him without his father because some one ordered a topedo to plow into a ship carrying him. All men must serve in the military when reaching the age of 18 years in Korea. It is the law and they all do it. The sailors on that ship had no choice but to serve their country.

I just wish those responsible would have seen the face on that woman as I did this afternoon. It was heartbreaking.

Anna Akhmatova

In Memoriam, July 19, 1914
By Anna Akhmatova

Translated by Stephen Edgar

We aged a hundred years and this descended
In just one hour, as at a stroke.
The summer had been brief and now was ended;
The body of the ploughed plains lay in smoke.

The hushed road burst in colors then, a soaring
Lament rose, ringing silver like a bell.
And so I covered up my face, imploring
God to destroy me before battle fell.

And from my memory the shadows vanished
Of songs and passions-burdens I'd not need.
The Almighty bade it be-with all else banished-
A book of portents terrible to read.

Anna Akhmatova is the pen name of Anna Andreyevna Gorenko and was born in Odessa in 1889. Her birthday was yesterday, June 23rd. She died in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) on March 5, 1966. She is considered one of the greatest 20th Century Russian poets.

It is hard for me to visualize this poet's experiences during the invasion of her country by Germany and during the awful years of Joseph Stalin for I was born and lived in a country most of my life that never knew war first hand as she did. I only heard about those years from other people and from books. She had refused to emigrate from her country to the West when others left. She was considered an enemy of the State by Stalin. Many people including herself suffered greatly and her husband, who she divorced, was later executed. Her son was jailed many times.

About three weeks ago, I attended a festival in Seoul in which there were pictures of the Korean War in the 1950's and the occupation of Korea by Japan earlier. People filed past the devastating pictures silently and it had to be hard for them as it affected relatives, fellow Koreans and some of those pictures were horrible. Korea is a country that knows war and continues to be aware of the threat of war especially by irresponsible people in leadership roles.

I can't see how anyone can voluntarily bring war to anyone especially their own people. Reading Akhmatova's poetry especially the above poem brings this incredibility to my mind even more. It is as if some people operate without hearts, without feelings, without a conscience, without love. It happens,as we all know, and especially the people here in this country can wage war without considering the real price of war. I wish it weren't so; but it is. It is up to such poets as Akhmatova to bring the real price of war into a language that at least some of us can understand. Sometimes, that is all that can be done.

(Sources: Wikipedia and Poetry Foundation)

Queen Elizabeth I

On Monsieur's Departure
By Queen Elizabeth I

I grieve and dare not show my discontent,
I love and yet am forced to seem to hate,
I do, yet are not say I ever meant,
I seem stark mute but inwardly do prate.
I am and not, I freeze and yet am burned,
Since from myself another self I turned.

My care is like my shadow in the sun,
Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it,
Stands and lies by me, doth what I have done.
His too familiar care doth make me rue it.
No means I find to rid him from my breasts,
Till by the end of things it be supprest.

Some gentler passion slide into my mind,
For I am soft and made of melting snow;
Or be more cruel, love, and so be kind.
Let me float or sink, be high or low.
Or let me live with some more sweet content,
Or die and so forget what love ere meant.

Many people forget that before Elizabeth(1533-1603) became queen, she spent time in the Tower of London as a prisoner. There were times that many wanted her to be executed so she could not achieve the crown. She learned strength in those dark days. She also knew that her father, King Henry the 8th executed her mother so he could get a new queen. Court politics could be deadly. Anne Boleyn could have saved her head if she would have agreed to take her daughter, Elizabeth out of the line of succession and declare her a bastard.

During her long life, Elizabeth pretended she would marry if she could find someone to marry. I don't think she ever had the intention of doing that. She would lose the power she had and end up back as someone's property to do as they wished as was done to her mother. She learned to be very careful and kept her own counsel. She could not trust anyone. If she loved, she had to do it in secret and she could not be alone with her amour. She slept with her ladies in waiting. She had to be above all gossip. That still did not keep the gossip from linking her with different men in her life, but nothing could be proved.

In this poem, she tells of her love but never says who. That would give too much power to someone. She had to sign the death warrant of her cousin Mary Queen of Scots and yet she agreed to the succession of Mary's son years later as her heir after her own death. People were happy that they would finally have a man as king but he was not as good as a king as Queen Elizabeth was as a ruler.

I think this poem shows that Elizabeth was a talented poet. England was well served by her rule as queen and few if any rulers performed their job as well as she did. Elizabeth is the author of speeches and letters as well as poems and they were crafted with great rhetorical skill and, in some cases, revised for publication. She was highly skilled in oration and the epistle and they were the basis in which she communicated her power. She had to walk the tightrobe of being the mother of her people, womanly and yet the master and in power without seemingly masculine. Many people felt she did so extremely well.

Overall, Queen Elizabeth was a signicant author in her own right as well as a major influence of the flowering of a great literary age known as the Elizabethan Age. It would be a mistake to downplay her influence during this important time.

Robinson Jeffers

The Beauty of Things

By Robinson Jeffers


To feel and speak the astonishing beauty of things-earth, stone and water,
Beast, man and woman, sun and moon and stars-
The blood-shot beauty of human nature, its thoughts, frenzies and passions,
And unhuman nature its towering reality-
For man's half dream; man, you might say, is nature dreaming, but rock
And water and sky are content-to feel
Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural
Beauty, is the sole business of poetry.
The rest's diversion: those holy or noble sentiments, the intricate ideas,
The love, lust, longing: reasons, but not the reason.




I am not going to replay the life of this remarkable man and poet who lived from 1887 to 1962 although if the reader is not acquainted with this man's work and life he or she should visit some of the web sites that contain his life story and of course read his other poems as I did. I chose the above poem only because I love it and it speaks of my own love of nature.

I have been to Carmel, California where the author spent his last years. I envied his time there for when I was there it was very commercial and full of tourists. Still, any area along the Big Sur is still very lovely. As a child I used to travel up and down the spine of California from San Diego to Oregon to visit an aunt. I like that part of California too although many people do not. I also like taking the train which travels along the coast more which is also stunning.

Korea is pleasing to the eye too. Much of the countryside is empty of people for the most part although the trees are young as I have mentioned. Korea has been ravaged through the centuries by war both from without and within. The mountains are sharp and angular but no ice caps as there are in California at least none that I have seen. I think I miss Mt. Shasta as far as nature is concerned.

I like Daejeon for its closeness to the mountains and for me mountains mean nature although I have loved the deserts of California and the Southwestern United States for that very reason. The mountains, rocks, streams will all be here long after I am gone. Korea is an example of the fragileness of nature in that the trees had to be planted again by humans after humans burned them all down in a war against each other. Yet, it is the remarkableness of human beings that people from all walks of life went out during their spare time to do it and it was hard work.

"Beauty, is the sole business of poetry."

It is poets like Robinson Jeffers and Walt Whitman that can see the beauty in everything around them and then translate it all into words so we as readers and listeners can understand what we have and appreciate it. Yesterday, my purse got stolen from and it was really nothing very valuable but it was ugly in that the thief called me back and wanted a reward. It all worked out in the end. It was only a small tragedy and greater ones no doubt happened yesterday. I looked for a poem to remind me of the beauty of this world that is really here and found it in Robinson Jeffers' poem. It is very good we have poets in this world. We really need them.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Bed in Summer
By Robert Louis Stevenson

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.

I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people's feet
Still past me in the street.

And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?

It's a children's poem, one that I knew well growing up. I also read "Treasure Island" as a child by Robert Louis Stevenson and many other books by this author. Reading him always brings those memories back and all of the movies that were made of "Treasure Island". I was lucky in that the library was full of his books and no one minded when I checked them out as some of them were in the adult section. It took me many years to understand why I found "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" so horrifying. It took a therapist to tie the alcoholic father and the main character who drank a substance that turned him into a monster as something that was too close to reality for me as a child.

In Korea, the time does not change so daylight savings time is something that is not a concern. Still, I remember as a child going to bed in the daytime when I desperately wanted to stay up and play some more. Now, of course I go to bed when I want or need to. In the United States few people were walking on the street anymore anyhow. It was the loud cars that raced up and down the streets. My apartment here is not close to the street, but I can still hear the buses running all night. The university is across the street and not that many students have cars here.

My apartment is surrounded by parks created by a large corporation who has a office next door and the parks consists of a soccer field, basketball court, tennis courts and a place to ride bikes. They often play games at night. The gardens are beautiful and there is a place for a picnic. It was there that I discovered that there are cuckoo birds. I was astonished for it sounded as if the surrounded woods were filled with cuckoo clocks. I always thought they made up that bird. Korea is full of birds and it is fun to watch and hear them.

Sometimes reading a poem written so many years ago is like opening a time capsule. It is hearing and feeling someone who has since past away. I can still feel the delight Stevenson must have still felt as an adult in looking at life through the eyes of a child.

I think it is important to read children's literature even as adults and certainly poetry meant for children. It is important that we never lose that delight that Stevenson so evidently had and to remember the poems that we read and enjoyed as children. I read these poems to my children and grandchildren myself. I still read them to myself and I hope we all still read them as we read Stevenson's books over and over again.

Jorge Luis Borges

The Art of Poetry
By Jorge Luis Borges

To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.

To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.

To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
nto a muic, a sound, and a symbol.

To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadness-such is poetry
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.

Sometimes at evening there's a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
dislosing to each ofus his face.

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.

Art is endless like a river flowing,
passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and yet another, like the river flowing.

(I did not find a translator's name .)

In this poem, I found poetry, art, life, dreams and blended together into one; and I believe that life is that way and that we drift into one dream and then into another and we call it life. Life is the poetry that makes up our dreams, our world both out there in the heavens, the world around us and the world within. Borges who became blind must have felt the line between the outer and inner worlds disappear even more than many of us. As I grow older, I float through this life more and more as in a dream.