Waga oka no okami ni iite furashimeshi yuki no kudakeshi soko ni chirikemu

我が岡のおかみに言ひて降らしめし
雪のくだけしそこに散りけむ

Roma-ji: Waga oka no okami ni iite furashimeshi yuki no kudakeshi soko ni chirikemu
English Translation: It was I who asked
the dragon god of my hill
to send down the snow—
and a few crumbs of it, I think,
must have scattered over there.
Meaning: I bade the dragon god of my hill to send down snow; some broken crumbs of it must have scattered over your way.
Commentary: Book Two Love Poems 104

Headnote: "A poem offered by Lady Fujiwara in reply"
Answering the Emperor's boast of heavy snow, she parries with wit: it must be crumbs of the snow she had the dragon god of her hill send down that scattered over his way.
She calls his "great snow" mere "crumbs" and claims her own village as the snow's true source, an exchange built on reversals of large and small, source and remnant.
The author, Fujiwara no Ioe no Iratsume, was a daughter of Fujiwara no Kamatari and became a consort of Emperor Tenmu. The headnote calls her Lady Fujiwara; she was also known as Ōhara no Ōtoji.

The first line, "waga oka no," refers to the hill at Ōhara where she lived.
In the second line, "okami ni iite," okami is the dragon god who governs rain and snow. The sounds of oka, "hill," and okami echo each other.
In the third line, "furashimeshi," shime is the causative auxiliary: "that I caused to fall."
The fourth line, "yuki no kudakeshi," means "the crumbs of snow," recasting the preceding poem's "great snow" as small fragments.
In the final line, "soko ni chirikemu," kemu is past conjecture: must have scattered there. Against the preceding poem's "it will fall only later," she replies that it fell here first.
Author: Fujiwara no Ioe no Iratsume
Source: Manyoshu
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