When you see this, post a poem
[meme ganked from chomiji]
Preface to "Spring and Asura"
The phenomenon called I
Is one postulated, organic alternating-current-lamp
Blue illumination
(A complex of all transparent ghosts)
Together with scenes and with everyone
Busily, busily flickering
Very surely to keep on lighting,
One karmic alternating-current-lamp
Blue illumination
(Light persisting, its electric lamp lost)
These, from twenty-two months’
Direction sensed to be past
Papers and mineral ink assembling
(Everything that flickers with me
Everyone senses at the same time)
Continuing on to this,
Are links and links of light and shade,
Sketches of mental images as they are
About all this, people, galaxies, asuras and sea urchins
Eating cosmic dust, inhaling air or saltwater
Might think up fresh ontologies
But they are ultimately a mental climate
Yet surely these recorded scenes are
Each the very scene recorded as it is
And if it is nothing, nothing itself is as it is
And so to an extent is shared by everyone
(All is within me everyone
So everyone within each one is all)
Yet within the Cenozoic alluvial epoch’s
Enormous shining accumulation of time,
The words supposed to have been rendered correctly
In a light’s eclipse, time’s mere speck
(Or a billion years of Asura)
Might have already changed composition or quality
And yet both I and the typographer
Might sense them to be not changed at all,
That, as a tendency, is possible,
Really as we sense our receptive organs
And scenes and characters
Just sensing them in common,
So what is called records and histories, geological histories
Along with various data
(Under the temporal spatial constraints of karma)
Are no more than what we sense
Perhaps two thousand years from now
A pertinently different geology will be adopted
Relevant evidence will emerge one by one from the past
So everyone will think that two thousand years before
There were colorless peacocks filling the blue sky
And then aspiring scholars at the upper stratum of the atmosphere
From the place of glittering frozen nitrogen
Will excavate splendid fossils
Or might well find
In a stratified plane of Cretaceous sandstone
Gigantic footprints of transparent humankind
All these propositions are asserted
As properties of images or time itself
In the fourth dimensional continuum
Kenji Miyazawa, January 20, 1924
Preface to "Spring and Asura"
The phenomenon called I
Is one postulated, organic alternating-current-lamp
Blue illumination
(A complex of all transparent ghosts)
Together with scenes and with everyone
Busily, busily flickering
Very surely to keep on lighting,
One karmic alternating-current-lamp
Blue illumination
(Light persisting, its electric lamp lost)
These, from twenty-two months’
Direction sensed to be past
Papers and mineral ink assembling
(Everything that flickers with me
Everyone senses at the same time)
Continuing on to this,
Are links and links of light and shade,
Sketches of mental images as they are
About all this, people, galaxies, asuras and sea urchins
Eating cosmic dust, inhaling air or saltwater
Might think up fresh ontologies
But they are ultimately a mental climate
Yet surely these recorded scenes are
Each the very scene recorded as it is
And if it is nothing, nothing itself is as it is
And so to an extent is shared by everyone
(All is within me everyone
So everyone within each one is all)
Yet within the Cenozoic alluvial epoch’s
Enormous shining accumulation of time,
The words supposed to have been rendered correctly
In a light’s eclipse, time’s mere speck
(Or a billion years of Asura)
Might have already changed composition or quality
And yet both I and the typographer
Might sense them to be not changed at all,
That, as a tendency, is possible,
Really as we sense our receptive organs
And scenes and characters
Just sensing them in common,
So what is called records and histories, geological histories
Along with various data
(Under the temporal spatial constraints of karma)
Are no more than what we sense
Perhaps two thousand years from now
A pertinently different geology will be adopted
Relevant evidence will emerge one by one from the past
So everyone will think that two thousand years before
There were colorless peacocks filling the blue sky
And then aspiring scholars at the upper stratum of the atmosphere
From the place of glittering frozen nitrogen
Will excavate splendid fossils
Or might well find
In a stratified plane of Cretaceous sandstone
Gigantic footprints of transparent humankind
All these propositions are asserted
As properties of images or time itself
In the fourth dimensional continuum
Kenji Miyazawa, January 20, 1924