A Love Letter, by Nanao Sakaki

[asakiyume]

I first came upon this poem in 2007; I love it. I shared it back at the time, but that was 16 years ago, so I'm sharing it again--this time with illustrations. (Some of them are click-through-able to the original person's photo on Flickr... others are just shamelessly ripped from stock photos and what-have-you.)

"A Love Letter" was originally published in a collection called Break the Mirror.



Within a circle of one meter
You sit, pray and sing,

Within a shelter ten meters large
You sleep well, rain sounds a lullaby.

Within a field a hundred meters large
Raise rice and goats.

Within a valley a thousand meters large
Gather firewood, water, wild vegetables and Amanitas.

Within a forest ten kilometers large
Play with raccoons, hawks,
Poison snakes and butterflies.



Mountainous country Shinano
A hundred kilometers large
Where someone lives leisurely, they say.



Within a circle ten thousand kilometers large
Go to see the southern coral reef in summer
Or winter drifting ices in the sea of Okhotsk.

Within a circle one hundred thousand kilometers large
Swimming in the sea of shooting stars.

Within a circle a million kilometers large
Upon the spaced-out yellow mustard blossoms
The moon in the east, the sun west.



Within a circle ten billion kilometers large
Pop far out of the solar system mandala.



Within a circle ten thousand light years large
The Galaxy full blooming in spring.

Within a circle one billion light years large
Andromeda is melting away into snowing cherry flowers.

Now within a circle ten billion light years large
All thoughts of time, space are burnt away
There again you sit, pray and sing
You sit, pray and sing.

Comments

[sonia]

How beautiful! I love how much your illustrations add, starting with a Japanese child and home to carry through the expanding circle. They're all wonderful. Did you make the collage of the last one?

(When I reread it, I noticed a possible typo and looked up the verse:
Within a circle one hundred thousand kilometers large
Swimming in the sea of shooting stars.)

[asakiyume]

Oh thank you for checking that! I noticed the repetition and thought, Can that be right?, but then didn't go to check any outside sources. I will fix the text.

I did make the collage for the last one! And manipulated the colors for the fractal, so I'm feeling very pleased with myself, even though it's the very most basic sort of image manipulation.

[sonia]

Your collage is perfect for the verse. Congrats on successful image manipulation!

There's so much in the poem! I thought Amanitas were poisonous, so I looked them up, since why would someone be gathering them, and it turns out some are ok to eat, and have hallucinogenic properties, in addition to the poisonous ones. And then it mentions poison snakes in the next verse.

[asakiyume]

Yes, I noticed that too. I took it to be an embrace of all things, the butterflies and poison snakes equally. And the amanitas, they're ambiguous because they could be any of those possibilities you mention, the healthful, the mind altering, the poisonous--and you get the feeling the speaker would welcome any.

[sonia]

Yes, acceptance, inclusion, and also I wonder if the narrator is saying, “Be careful, there are subtle and overt dangers out there (and you hold my whole Universe).”

[asakiyume]

That definitely seems like it could be part of the intention too.

[anna_wing]

Thoughts prompted by this lovely post:

One thing that Buddhist and Hindu scriptures do have is an almost realistic sense of cosmic scale.

English-language fantasy is very small-scale, compared to science fiction 9and so many autors seem to think that a thousand years is a long time, or that "one-in-a-thousand_ is a small number.Not to mention, getting into Star Wars fan-fictio made me realise how many people think that "light-speed" is fast for galactic (never mind inter-galactic) distances...


Tolkien ran into this problem late in his life, when he made his abortive effort to try to make Arda/Middle-earth consistent with the Primary World.

[asakiyume]

I confess I can't even truly wrap my mind around it. Recently--like for the past couple of years--I've been amazed by how actually diverse "diversity" is here on Earth--whether we're talking about types of grass or organisms in a biome (even a "boring"-looking biome; let alone one that's known for diversity) or human cultures. When people say "there are many points of view," they are usually thinking of only two! Or at best three! And yet there are so many. It's like being in Leticia, and there aren't just one local indigenous people, or two, but five or six--all with their own languages. And on and on. And this "many-ness" is everywhere we look, here.

Somehow this relates to the grandness of cosmic scale, I think, right? There is so much muchness, so much more than we think. And similarly, when we say time is long or space is wide, it's not just a little long, or a little wide. It's inconceivably long and wide.

[anna_wing]

Yes. The deeper you look, the more diversity there is, so every group in effect has to make its own decision about where and when to stop, and say, "enough, these are the parameters that shall define us", for whatever value of 'us' the majority can decide and enforce.

[squirrelitude]

I think one of the big perspective shifts for me in the past year was when someone pointed out that the speed of light is *slow*. And it's true! Or at least, it's true for computers and for space travel. ;-)

[asakiyume]

The leisurely speed of light: "Take your time, my friends. I INSIST."

(BTW I have been harvesting my chickweed and eating it--A-plus, good forage!)

[smokingboot]

Extraordinary. Thank you for sharing, and adding your own art to it. X

[asakiyume]

My absolute pleasure; thank you so much for being here to share it with!

[minoanmiss]

*immediately adds this to my Poetry files to behold again and again*

[asakiyume]

*** hugs ****

[amaebi]

Thank you! The illustrations really light this up!

[asakiyume]

Thank you! I'm so glad. I love the things he chooses for each step outward.

[mallorys_camera]

I love this. And the illustrations you've chosen really suit the poem.

[asakiyume]

** hugs **

I love it too. And I had a lot of fun choosing the images--I'm really glad you think they suit.

[sartorias]

Oh that is so very beautiful!

[asakiyume]

^_^

Very glad you like it.

[mount_oregano]

Thank you for posting this!

[asakiyume]

You're very welcome--it's my pleasure!

[pameladean]

How wonderful! I'd have had a lot more trouble appreciating the poem without the images. Really inspired. P.

[asakiyume]

I'm so glad the images help!

Have you ever seen the short film "Powers of Ten?" It starts with a couple on a picnic blanket one meter square, and then goes up and up by tens, until you're up multigalaxy wide, and then it zooms down the other direction, to the subatomic. I wonder if the poet was inspired by that.

[wayfaringwordhack]

Speaking of space/time/distance, how do you feel about your proximity or distance to the asakiyume of 16 whole years ago? :)

[asakiyume]

Strange! She was definitely still trying to be more of a persona, trying to maintain an illusion (without outright lying) of living essentially in a little hut in the woods as opposed to in a housing development in a rural community in the process of transforming itself into a bedroom community--like where's the poetry in THAT?!

[wayfaringwordhack]

I think *you* could find poetry in just about anything. <3

[asakiyume]

* * strong hugs * *

PS

[asakiyume]

The long-ago entry in question is private now (I gradually have been locking down entries from long ago...), but weird thing: I posted it on April 29, 2007--so exactly 16 years and 2 weeks before this one. Maybe the time of year puts me in this kind of a mood?

Re: PS

[wayfaringwordhack]

I too find that my thoughts turn in certain directions depending on the time of year.

Your collage opens up the poem's meaning

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks so much.

Re: Your collage opens up the poem's meaning

[asakiyume]

Thank you for saying this--it means so much to me.