Rengetsu (1) by Ed Hack

Spring wind
Come once again–
Do not be too rough
On the delicate branches and buds
Of the weeping willows.

How many did she lose? One says five, one
six. Five girls, one boy, dead. Two husbands dead.
Her father dead. Her mother isn’t known.
All say that she was beautiful. Did dread
afflict her? No one knows. She had enough.
She cut her hair, became a nun, and found
in poems a voice that lasts, that carries grief
to term and to this day and, too, the sound,
the roar, of snowmelt–spring that’s rushing in.
Spring wind, she writes, Come once again–but do
not be too rough…on buds, for what begins
is beautiful but delicate since new.
So many poems, perhaps three poems a day–
each one a birth that death can’t take away.

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Ed Hack was a teacher. He’s now a poet. He has been writing for years, been published here and there. For the last three years He’s been exploring the unpredictable passions and precisions of the sonnet.

Photo credit: Dirk Dreyer   www.dreyerpictures.com