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.)

[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.

[smokingboot]

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

[minoanmiss]

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

[amaebi]

Thank you! The illustrations really light this up!

[mallorys_camera]

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

[sartorias]

Oh that is so very beautiful!

[mount_oregano]

Thank you for posting this!

[pameladean]

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

[wayfaringwordhack]

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

Your collage opens up the poem's meaning

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks so much.