Reading Robert Frost(3)

(photo) She is relaxed, in Matsudo, Chiba prefecture, Japan


Dust of Snow


The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.


I like this poem. It often happens but we don't try to make poem on it. I think poets can find out poesie in the ordinary life. The theme of this poem is the interaction between the nature and human being. It reminds me that we are part of the nature. The nature is often the trigger that makes us break through the difficulties. Japanese mathematician OKA kiyoshi( 1901-1978）could solve the difficult mathematical question as soon as he saw the beautiful sea from his car.

Reading Robert Frost(2)

(photo) everyone has some reasons for being what he is, in Matsudo, Chiba prefecture, Japan


Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.



I guess the poem expresses the dawn in the early spring. In this moment, the first green is coloured gold and the early leaf looks like a flower. I think the author has fine sensibility to the nature. But he seems to be sad because the moment is so short. Nothing gold can stay. Our lives are also short like the gold appearing in the dawn. But I like his thought 'nothing gold can stay.' It means something gold can't stay but it appears in the world again and again. I think our lives are also something gold in this sense.

Haiku in English(8)

(photo) red flowers in June, in Matsudo, Chiba prefecture, Japan

Can words be as still
As the motionless trees,
In this solstice time?

John Bate, England

■I interpreted the phrase " in this solstice time" as the dynamism of the nature or the universe. Both of them are silent. Only human beings are noisy. The author compares words with the motionless trees. Words can't be as still as the trees. That's probably what he's saying. But how silent this haiku is!

Haiku of Jack Kerouac(13)

(photo) Houttuynia cordata, Matsudo, Chiba prefecture

2 travelling salesmen
passing each other
On a Western road

■This haiku symbolizes the American society very well. Salesmen are an essencial element in the capitalist society and the phrase "passing each other on a Western road" expresses wide-open spaces in U.S. I think this haiku has a loneliness in the modern world. Where did 2 salesmen go after passing each other?

Reading Robert Frost(1)

(photo) a sleeping man, in Matsudo, Chiba prefecture, Japan


Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.



■This poem predicts the contemporary world. I think fire symbolizes evil human behaviors, especillay the war and ice the fear of the nature, the chage of climate in the modern terms. The two phrases "From what I've tasted of desire" and " I think I know enough of hate" are probably a pair. I can understand the relationship between fire and desire, but I can't hate and ice. This hate may mean human's hate for the nature or human's control over the nature as a thing or a object. The author is talking about the end of the world but it sounds like something humorous. I feel that he had a crude look at human beings. This poem reminds me of Issa's following haiku.

We are skeleton bones

even though we are here like this

the air in the evening