Diaries of Court Ladies
That nurse went to see the grave and returned sobbing, saying:
I seek her in the field, but she is not there,
Nor is she in the smoke of the cremation.
Where is her last dwelling-place?
How can I find it?
The lady who had been my stepmother heard of this [and wrote]:
When we wander in search of her,
Ignorant of her last dwelling-place,
Standing before the thought
Tears must be our guide.
The person who had sent "The Prince Yearning after the Buried" wrote:
How she must have wandered seeking the unfindable
In the unfamiliar fields of bamboo grasses,
Vainly weeping!
Reading these poems my brother, who had followed the funeral that night, composed a poem:
Before my vision
The fire and smoke of burning
Arose and died again.
To bamboo fields there is no more returning,
Why seek there in vain?
It snowed for many days, and I thought of the nun who lived on Mount Yoshino, to whom I wrote:
Snow has fallen
And you cannot have
Even the unusual sight of men
Along the precipitous path of the Peak of Yoshino.
On the Sociable month of the next year father was looking forward with happy expectation to the night
