Five decades of wandering, in every step perhaps your heels planted seedlings of words, of love, of wisdom, of life. So much of your history remains a hidden story. We’re you a slave, a samurai, a cook, a poet, or everything and more? We can read scrolls after scrolls but never can we know.
A beautiful name you gifted yourself, Basho, after your beloved word-artist Li Po which carries the tart taste of a white plum. But no, plum did not win over your favourite plant — banana. In 17 syllables you have transformed a pair of cotyledons to a blooming spring’s cherry blossom of poetry. Until Autumn came to dry your ink in a field of golden, lifeless weeds.
short fifty years of
singing cuckoos, sorrowed snows,
timeless lines remain.
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