Sakakiba no tokiwa kakiwa ni yūshide ya katakurushi naru me na miseso kami

English Translation

By the sacred tree,
evergreen and unchanging,
by its hanging streamers:
let me not see such hard, such
bitter days again, O god.

Meaning

By the sacred evergreen, unchanging as rock, and by the streamers hung upon it: let me not see such hard and bitter days again, O god.

Commentary

23 Poems Offered at Inari and Kamo

The ninth month came, and thinking that the world would be at its most beautiful, that she should like to go on a pilgrimage somewhere and lay before the god the frailty of her own situation, she set out very quietly to a certain place. On a single sheaf of offerings she wrote these poems: one for the lower shrine, one for the middle, one for the last. Then, at the end of the same month, she went in the same manner to another place, this time with two sheaves: two poems for the lower shrine and two for the upper. Such were the things she muttered where no god could hear them.
The author was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. The place she visited in secret is understood to be Inari at Fushimi, since one of the poems names Mount Inari. The other place, visited at the end of the same month, is understood to be the Kamo shrines, since the poems speak of the purification stream and the sacred grove. The text names neither shrine, calling them only the lower, the middle and the last, and the lower and the upper.
It is the end of the ninth month of the third year of Kōhō, and the place is the lower shrine of the other sanctuary visited in the same quiet way.
It is the second of the two poems offered at the lower shrine.
She then wrote two poems for the upper shrine, "Itsushika mo itsushika mo to zo machiwataru mori no koma yori hikari mimu ma o" and "Yūdasuki musubōretsutsu nageku koto taenaba kami no shirushi to omowamu," and the narrative closes by saying that these were things she muttered where no god could hear them.

The opening names the evergreen used in worship, and leads into the phrase of the second line, which means enduring as rock and unchanging, a phrase owed to the tree's evergreen leaves. The third line names the mulberry-bark streamers hung on the branch as an offering. So far the poem is nothing but the furniture of the shrine, set down in words. The fourth line means hard and painful, and it picks up the syllable for hardness from the second line, so that the hardness of what endures forever slides directly into the hardness of her own lot. The close is a prohibition addressed to the god: do not show me such a lot. Three objects of the sanctuary — the tree, the enduring rock, the streamers — are laid one on another, and that hard chain is folded back upon herself in the final phrase. It is a poem offered to a god, and its petition is the urgent one of asking not to be made to suffer.

Author

The Mother of Fujiwara no Michitsuna

Source

Kagero Nikki

Other