In a mountain village
where evening cicadas cry—
at dusk’s fading hour,
there comes no one to visit
but the wind alone that passes.
- Meaning
- In a mountain village where the evening cicadas cry, at dusk no one comes to visit—only the wind passes through.
- Commentary
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Book Four Autumn Poems (Part One)
This is a lonely poem that laments how no one comes to visit in the mountain village. At the hour of dusk, the feeling of longing for others grows all the more deep.
- Author
- Unknown Poet
- Source
- Kokin Wakashu
- Other
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- Crimson leaves have fallen and lie piled at my dwelling— in this lonely place, for whom does the cricket cry, so many times, in waiting?
- As evening cicadas begin their cries, the day seems done— so I thought at first; yet it was but the mountain’s shadow that had fallen there.
- Though it is not from the one for whom I wait—still, the first wild goose’s cry heard this morning at dawn is wondrous to my heart.
- On the autumn wind the first wild goose is heard— its cry drifting near; for whom does it bear a letter, carried thus across the sky?