A Vixen
When snow falls
on the back of the wild fox,
she becomes a pale blue shadow.
At night in a blizzard
the shadow comes running down
straight from the mountain,
circling the fences in a frozen village,
moving around the orange dreams of the people.
The blue shadow, before they know it,
sits in front of a chicken coop.
Before dawn in February,
in the gleam of a damask mantle of snow
the vixen returns to the mountain.
She is pregnant.
A Footprint
Long ago
a fox ran along a clay river bank.
After an interim
of tens of thousands of years
a footprint turned fossil remains.
Looking at it, you’ll see
what the fox was thinking while running.
When snow falls
on the back of the wild fox,
she becomes a pale blue shadow.
At night in a blizzard
the shadow comes running down
straight from the mountain,
circling the fences in a frozen village,
moving around the orange dreams of the people.
The blue shadow, before they know it,
sits in front of a chicken coop.
Before dawn in February,
in the gleam of a damask mantle of snow
the vixen returns to the mountain.
She is pregnant.
A Footprint
Long ago
a fox ran along a clay river bank.
After an interim
of tens of thousands of years
a footprint turned fossil remains.
Looking at it, you’ll see
what the fox was thinking while running.
Tr. William I.
Elliott & Katsumasa Nishihara. From Iwana
(‘Char’) (1964, supplemented posthumously). Kurahara left Tokyo
in 1945 to live the last twenty years of his life in solitude. The second of these two poems was dictated on his deathbed - what an extraordinary last legacy!
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