I the Festival   

 

 

 

 

This Morning

This Morning I can't sleep in soiled sheets
isn't the way I was brought up, I'm definite.
White sheets get easily soiled.

The habit of not being able to take it easy unless I dream a dream until it becomes limpid
having stayed with me since childhood,
getting hot with the heat of myself burning wildly in fantastic time,
interpreting that this is a fire in someone else's dream,
I become awake little by little.

I just washed these sheets yesterday!
I just slept, quietly, without taking off my formal dress!
This morning
I can't forgive these sheets.

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Quarrel

Quarrel Just as you write about me,
so would I like to write about you,
but though I can be a poem you can't,
I complain in my dream.

I'm living your life, too;
I can't be like you, living from one fragment to another, I try to say,
and I get so upset I can't say it in words.
Gradually
I begin to suspect he might be writing about me secretly.

In the dream I'm so beautiful,
but my hell is that the real me is so ugly,
so he may be writing with unembarrassed openness. Once I begin to suspect that, there's no end.
Telling myself tonight I won't wake again until I get hold of the identity of it all,
I slide deeper into the dream.

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Getting off the Bus

Getting off the Bus Getting off the bus I happened to look into a distance
and saw myself walking.
Whatever else, I looked fine,
but unmindful of other people I was just then crossing a small bridge
determinedly, silently.
Beyond the bridge, too, the same sort of town seemed to continue.
Where in the world was I going?
That blouse and skirt
grandmother bought for me long ago.
Had I been wearing those things all these years?
I wanted to call out to her but mindful of other people I couldn't form a voice.
If only she walked toward me, I thought.
"Oh, you got off the bus, too," I heard someone say.
I looked, and it didn't seem to be where I was to get off.
"Because of me you became absorbed in chatting.
That's to blame," said apologetically
the acquaintance I happened to see on the same bus
before she went off in her own direction.

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(C) Nobuko Kimura / Hiroaki Sato