Hana nagasu se o mo mirubeki mikazuki no warete irinuru yama no ochikata

English Translation

Should I see the shoals
where the blossom is carried
the crescent has split
and gone down out of the sky
beyond the far mountainside

Meaning

I might have watched the shallows carrying the blossom away; but the crescent has broken and gone down beyond the far hills.

Commentary

Book Two Spring Poems II 152

Headnote: composed on the line about the moon setting and the blossom-strewn shallows growing dark, when Ki no Tsurayuki held a winding-water banquet.
The second poem on the winding-water banquet. The topic is a line of Chinese verse rendered into Japanese; Oe no Chisato's fifty-fifth poem in Book One is another such piece.
Sakanoue no Korenori was an early Heian poet, counted among the thirty-six immortals of poetry.
The time is the night of the third day of the third month; the place is beside shallows carrying blossom.
The occasion was the banquet held by Ki no Tsurayuki.

The first line names shallows carrying petals away, answering to the blossom-strewn shallows of the topic.
The auxiliary in the second line expresses possibility: shallows one might have seen. The implication is that with a moon they would have been visible.
The third line brings in a crescent, thin and weak in light.
The verb in the fourth line, to split, answers to the crescent's shape, turning the form into an action; the verb after it means the setting of the moon, answering to the topic's moon-setting.
The poem closes on a noun meaning a place far off. The moon sinks behind the hills and the blossom-carrying water is lost. The darkness of the topic is never named; only the setting of the moon is given. The Chinese line is divided into three elements and distributed across the five lines with some dexterity.

Author

Sakanoue no Koreyuki

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other