Monday, April 2, 2018

Anonymous Japanese poem: "If only when one heard"

On my birthday this year I turned sixty-seven. I remember how I looked forward to birthdays when I was a child; how I counted the months, the weeks, the days, the hours until I was finally another year older. What the heck was I thinking? Here is an anonymous, untitled, twentieth-century Japanese poem about the coming of Old Age.

If only when one heard
That Old Age was coming,
One could bolt the door,
Answer "Not at home,"
And refuse to meet him!

Source of poem: Great Short Poems from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (Dover Publications, 2011), edited by Dorothy Belle Pollack

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