How she must have wandered seeking the unfindable
In the unfamiliar fields of bamboo grasses,
Vainly weeping!
Reading these poems my brother, who had followed the funeral that night, composed a poem:
Before my vision
The fire and smoke of burning
Arose and died again.
To bamboo fields there is no more returning,
Why seek there in vain?
It snowed for many days, and I thought of the nun who lived on Mount Yoshino, to whom I wrote:
Snow has fallen
And you cannot have
Even the unusual sight of men
Along the precipitous path of the Peak of Yoshino.
On the Sociable month of the next year father was looking forward with happy expectation to the night when he might expect an appointment as Governor of a Province. He was disappointed, and a person who might have shared our joy wrote to me, saying:
"I anxiously waited for the dawn with uncertain hope."
The temple bell roused me from dreams
And waiting for the starlit dawn
The night, alas! was long as are
One hundred autumn nights.
I wrote back:
Long was the night.
The bell called from dreams in vain,
For it did not toll our realized hopes.