Hatsuseme no tsukuru yūbana miyoshino no taki no minawa ni sakinikerazu ya

泊瀬女の造る木綿花み吉野の
滝の水沫に咲きにけらずや

Roma-ji: Hatsuseme no tsukuru yūbana miyoshino no taki no minawa ni sakinikerazu ya
English Translation: The women of Hatsuse—
the cloth flowers they fashion,
in fair Yoshino,
in the foam of the rapids,
have they not come to bloom?
Meaning: The mulberry-cloth flowers that the women of Hatsuse make—have they not burst into bloom here in the foaming spray of the rapids of fair Yoshino?
Commentary: Book Six Miscellaneous Poems 912

Headnote continued from the preceding poem: "An envoy in a certain book reads"
This poem praises the rapids by likening their white foam to mulberry-cloth flowers, exclaiming that the cloth flowers made by the women of Hatsuse have bloomed in the spray of the torrent at fair Yoshino. It is the third of the three poems that another book attached as envoys to the long poem 907, composed on Empress Genshō's progress to Yoshino in the fifth month of Yōrō 7 (723).
Hatsuse lies around present-day Hase in Sakurai City, Nara Prefecture, and is thought to have been known for making mulberry-cloth flowers. The conceit is that the handiwork of the women of distant Hatsuse has blossomed in the Yoshino River, and by likening the spray to the white cloth flowers used in sacred rites, the poem lends holiness to the rushing water.
"Envoys from a certain book" means envoys handed down in another text; the three poems 910 to 912 belong to this group. Apart from the two envoys in the main text, the compiler also recorded these poems, which had come down attached to the same long poem.
The poet, Kasa no Kanamura, was a court poet of the early Nara period who accompanied the sovereigns from Empress Genshō to Emperor Shōmu on their progresses and left many poems of praise. Together with Yamabe no Akahito, he is regarded as a representative poet of the age.

The device of likening the spray of the rapids to mulberry-cloth flowers is the same as in 909, one of the envoys in the main text, "like white mulberry-cloth flowers tumbling and churning"; this poem expands that comparison into the conceit of the whole poem.
The first line, "The women of Hatsuse," means the women of the land of Hatsuse, a district in eastern Yamato along the Hase River.
The second line, "the cloth flowers they fashion," refers to the white artificial flowers the women make from paper-mulberry fibre. Everything up to here forms the subject of "bloomed" in the final line.
In the third line, "in fair Yoshino," the honorific prefix "mi-" moves the scene from Hatsuse to Yoshino.
The fourth line, "in the foam of the rapids," means in the bubbling spray of the torrent. The white froth is seen as the cloth flowers in bloom.
The final line, "have they not come to bloom," means "have they not blossomed," and the rhetorical question formed by adding the negative "zu" and the interrogative "ya" to "nikeri" expresses surprise and wonder with great force.
Author: Kasa no Kanamura
Source: Manyoshu
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