_What reason can there be that she_
_Strangely should seek a romance of the buried?_
_Buried now is the seeker_
_Deep under the mosses._
My sister's nurse said that since she had lost her, she had no reason
to stay and went back to her own home weeping.
_Thus death or parting separates us each from the other,_
_Why must we part? Oh, world too sad for me!_
"For remembrance of her I wanted to write about her," began a letter
from her nurse--but it stopped short with the words, "Ink seems to have
frozen up, I cannot write any more."[41]
_How shall I gather memories of my sister?_
_The stream of letters is congealed._
_No comfort may be found in icicles._
So I wrote, and the answer was:
_Like the comfortless plover of the beach_
_In the sand printing characters soon to be washed away,_
_Unable to leave a more enduring trace in this fleeting world._
That nurse went to see the grave and returned sobbing, saying:
_I seek her in the field, but she is not there,_
_Nor is she in the smoke of the cremation._
_Where is her last dwelling-place?_
_How can I find it?_
The lady who had been my stepmother heard of this [and wrote]:
_When we wander in search of her,_
_Ignorant of her last dwelling-place,_
_Standing before the thought_
_Tears must be our guide._
The person who had sent "The Prince Yearning after the Buried" wrote:
_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._