Mount Ogura Part VIII

We're twenty or so. An intro to the mountain - and the campaign to revive it with poems - at Tree of Repose. A ninth century tanka read from an iron bridge over Marutamachi. Ogura Pond, with its stagnant green growth; and not far away, old Kensho-san, priest of Jojakkoji, unlocks the shrine of Fujiwara Teika, who glares darkly from within.

Following the monk

With a key as long as a wand ...

Autumn leaves

(Tito)

The most likely site of Teika's villa, ... now a kind of kitchen garden with withering lotus in pots. A day from Basho's Saga Nikki declaimed from Zen's field, opposite the gate to Rakushisha. The tiny gravestone, beneath which Kyorai most probably squats; and then the stone-lined well, boarded away into oblivion, which another poet used when he renounced the world aged twenty-three.

Saigyo's tears -

Rammed down his well

Plastic pipes

(John Dougill)

Trudging up Mt. Ogura, past an Emperor's grave, to Kisen (Turtle Spring). It's seen better days. Could be such a watery welcome to the ancient path to Teika's Vale, which nestles in the hilltop woods three hundred feet above. Instead, it is full of abject ruin - old wires drag, pots and bottles now in shards; the spring seeps by a sack of cement long since set completely rigid.

A house rotted away

In an autumn mountain -

Highway noise

(Mayumi Kawaharada)

Down to the Senou Cafe, where we find the full moon, pale red, floating outside its eastern window. Walking on towards Osawa Pond for a party-of-verse in the twilight ... thinking of the mountain whom so many before us have loved and praised.

Endless the pathways

Redolent of times gone by -

Ogura's shadow

(John McAteer)