Asahi teru sada no okabe ni naku tori no yonaki kaerau kono toshigoro o

朝日照る佐田の岡辺に泣く鳥の
夜哭きかへらふこの年ころを

Roma-ji: Asahi teru sada no okabe ni naku tori no yonaki kaerau kono toshigoro o
English Translation: Like the birds that cry
on the slopes of Sada Hill
where the morning shines,
I have wept night after night
through all this year gone by.
Meaning: Like the birds that cry on the slopes of Sada Hill where the morning sun shines, I have wept night after night all through this past year.
Commentary: Book Two Elegies 192

Headnote continued from the preceding poem: "Twenty-three poems composed in grief by the attendants of the Prince's palace"
Like the birds crying on the slopes of Sada Hill in the morning sun, the speaker has wept night after night throughout this past year, a poem of long-drawn mourning.
According to the headnote, these are twenty-three poems composed in grief by the attendants who served in Prince Kusakabe's palace. A left note, citing the Nihon shoki, records that the prince died in the fourth month of the third year of Empress Jitō's reign (689). The sequence takes up, scene by scene, the laments of the attendants: the garden and ponds of the Shima Palace bereft of their master, and the night watches they kept on the hills of Mayumi and Sada where the prince lay in state. This is the twenty-second poem of the sequence.
The authors were the attendants who served in Prince Kusakabe's palace, and their individual names have not come down to us. Toneri were officials who served close to the Emperor and members of the imperial family as guards and aides. One theory holds that Kakinomoto no Hitomaro composed the poems in the attendants' voice, but this is not settled.

The first line, "asahi teru," is the same as the first line of the seventh poem, 177.
The second line, "sada no okabe ni," means "on the slopes of Sada Hill," where the temporary shrine stood, and is identical to the second line of 177.
The preface runs through the third line, "naku tori no," and from the crying of birds leads to weeping again and again at night.
In the fourth line, "yonaki kaerau," kaerau means to repeat: weeping night after night.
The final line, "kono toshigoro o," means "through this past year," giving the length of the grief at the end by inversion.
Source: Manyoshu
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