Saijo Yaso: The Crow's Letter

I opened and read
The small red envelope
The mountain crow had brought:
'On the night of the moon
The hills will blaze
Savage and red.'

I was going to reply,
When my eyes opened.
Ah yes, there it was:
A single red leaf.


Tr. Geoffrey Bownas and Anthony Thwaite. Saijo (1892-1970) began as a poet of strange and almost morbid children's verse, something like a Japanese Walter de la Mare (the de la Mare of poems like Song of the Mad Prince, not twee faery); and then under French influence took an explicitly morbid, decadent path. This is from his earlier period: effective as a kind of nursery rhyme that threatens, without ever going that far, to turn into nightmare.