Tokiwa nasu kaku shi mo ga mo to omoedomo yo no koto nareba todomi kanetsu mo

常磐なすかくしもがもと思へども
世の事なれば留みかねつも

Roma-ji: Tokiwa nasu kaku shi mo ga mo to omoedomo yo no koto nareba todomi kanetsu mo
English Translation: Like the changeless rock,
so would I remain, I wish,
and yet though I think it,
since this is the way of the world,
I cannot hold it back
Meaning: I wish I could stay as I am forever, like an unchanging rock, but it is the way of the world, and I cannot hold time back.
Commentary: Book Five Miscellaneous Poems 805

Headnote continued from the preceding poem: "A poem lamenting how hard it is to abide in this world, with preface: envoy"
The poet laments that though he wishes to stay unchanged like a rock, old age is the way of the world and cannot be held back. Following the long poem's concrete picture of youth's prime slipping away and age closing in, it sums up the feeling in brief.
The preface says that the eight great sufferings gather easily and are hard to dispel, while the pleasures of a hundred years are hard to attain and quickly spent; what the ancients lamented has come to him now. So he wrote a song to dispel the grief of age, of hair turned gray. The left note says it was composed in Kama District on the twenty-first day of the seventh month of Jinki 5.
The poet, Yamanoue no Okura, was an official who went to Tang China as a junior secretary with the embassy appointed in Taihō 1. After his return he served as Governor of Hōki and in the household of the Crown Prince, and late in the Jinki era he was posted to Tsukushi as Governor of Chikuzen. He is known for poems rooted in everyday life, on the sufferings of human existence, love for family, and poverty, written against a background of learning in Chinese classics and Buddhist scripture.
Where the opening poem of the book, 793, took the emptiness of the world as a source of grief, this poem views the same law of the world as the problem of aging, lighting the book's theme of impermanence from another angle.

First line, "tokiwa nasu": "like an everlasting rock," set as the emblem of the unchanging.
Second line, "kaku shi mo ga mo to": "mo ga mo" is a particle of wish, voicing the longing to stay as he is.
Third line, "omoedomo": adversative, opening the gap between wish and reality.
Fourth line, "yo no koto nareba": "since it is the way of the world." It echoes "this world" in the opening poem and places aging within the law of impermanence.
Fifth line, "todomi kanetsu mo": unable to hold it back however one tries, echoing the long poem's "unable to hold back the prime of life."
Author: Yamanoue no Okura
Source: Manyoshu
Prev Poem: Shirokane mo kugane mo tama mo nani semu ni masareru takara ko ni shikame ya mo
Next Poem: Tatsu no ma mo ima mo eteshika aoniyoshi nara no miyako ni yukite komu tame