Bashō’s Child
by W. S. Merwin Beside the Fuji River there is a lost child crying dead for three hundred years and who knows how many more since the evening in autumn when her mother carried her out to the water noise that would cover the sound of her crying and then walked back into the silence and the child cried all night and into the frosty daylight when the men who discovered her stood over her like shadows their hands talking but only to each other until one of them at last bent to put something on the leaves beside her before they all went away with the sound of her crying following him and following the words he would write about her wherever the words might go From The Shadow of Sirius, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2008, page 70. This book won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2009. + + |