Kawara no Sadaijin & Ono no Komachi

TRANS. BY NAOKO FUJIMOTO

from One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each

09

These petals, youth only passing
as I think of you in greenish rain

—Ono no Komachi

14

Into the inner Oku,
a stone rubs silk with wild greens 
dying complicated paths 
as if my heart
tangles into yours
forgetting who I am.

—Kawara no Sadaijin

Naoko Fujimoto was born and raised in Nagoya, Japan. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in POETRY, the Kenyon Review, Crazyhorse, Seattle Review, Quarterly West, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Diode Poetry Journal, and PANK. She is the author of Glyph:Graphic Poetry=Trans. Sensory (Tupelo Press, 2021), Where I Was Born (Willow Publishing, 2019), and three chapbooks. She is an associate editor & outreach translation editor at RHINO Poetry.