One Thousand Summers

After I determined to abandon my love, my only regret is that I have no way to tell you in person.

Composed when the emperor heard that he was secretly visiting a lady who had come back from serving as the High Priestess of Ise, and posted guards, so he became unable to visit even in secret

As my love first came to realisation, word had already spread.

So his thoughts returned always to the same family. As he sank deeper in memories of Uji, of his strange, cruel ties with the Uji family, drake flies, than which no creatures are more fragile and insubstantial, were flitting back and forth in the evening light.    ‘I see the drake fly, take it up in my hand. Ah, here it is, I say − and it is gone.’   And he added softly, as always: ‘Here, and perhaps not here at all.’

For you I would have given up my life. Now together, I guard it dear.

For you, I head out to the fields to pick spring greens while snow falls upon my sleeves.

A poem from  a banquet of provincial and district governors, held in spring of the third year, on the first day of the first month, at provincial offices in Inaba province. 

The riot of threads for decking out the sacred incense led one of the princesses to remark upon the stubborn way their own lives had of spinning on.* Catching sight of a spool through a gap in the curtains, Kaoru recognized the allusion.  ‘Join my tears as beads,’ † he said softly. They found it very affecting, this suggestion that the sorrow of Lady Ise had been even as theirs; yet they were reluctant to answer. To show that they had caught the reference might seem pretentious.‡ But an answering reference immediately came to them: they could not help thinking of Tsurayuki, whose heart had not been ‘that sort of thread’, and who had likened it to a thread all the same as he sang the sadness of a parting that was not a bereavement.[*] Old poems, they could see, had much to say about the unchanging human heart. － Murasaki Shikibu  紫式部,  The Tale of Genji  (源氏物語  Genji monogatari ) Chapter 47 “Trefoil Knots” (総角  Agemaki ) *  Anonymous,  Kokinshū  806: This life goes on, however sad we ar