For Zelkova, Cedar, and Rice
For Zelkova, Cedar, and Rice
By Joshua Chalifour
The blurring, the zelkova,
it lives looking East.
The blue, the cedar,
the trees entangling clouds.
The harvest for the rice;
robbing soil again.
On the ground, the moss flowing
from what this half-melted
sky sometimes withers,
takes from the other.
Each terrifying technician
stalks the cedar roots,
snatches the zelkova veins, and
like rice, shouts out: eat!
Sometimes suffocating,
the cedar withers in the sky.
The rice harvest over,
stand on top of grass and
eat rice silently.
What lean rest!
As if it withered there.
Look: the zelkova tip in the wind.
Rest
By Kenji Miyazawa (translation: Hiroaki Sato) 1
1 Kenji Miyazawa, “Rest,” in A Future of Ice: Poems and Stories of a Japanese Buddhist, trans. Hiroaki Sato, "Spring & Asura" (Fourth Collection) and Others (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989).
On the ground cedar and zelkova roots
entangling, robbing each other
stand out like terrifying veins
from the grass and moss of this lean soil,
in the sky, clouds silently flowing east,
the cedar top withered,
the zelkova tip looking as if
it lives on snatches it takes from the wind
. . .sometimes the cedar withers the zelkova
sometimes the zelkova withers the cedar. . .
(Havest the rice, eat the rice, what for?
Eat the rice, harvest the rice, what for?)
The technician shouts over there,
the trees, blurring, look half-melted in the sky,
and again, suffocating, the blue rice stalks.