translated, from the Japanese, by Samuel Grolmes and Yumiko Tsumura

I asked what can you do    while you’re alive

a donkey doesn’t have ears    doesn’t have a mouth

eyes with long lashes over them like umbrellas

holding up philosophy      philosophy doesn’t take any responsibility

for debt or unhappiness

people despair get depressed      but

what can they see      when they so indolently desperately head toward a hole and

darkness

look at the braying donkey    a donkey doesn’t

fall or anything    get blindfolded all the time

she can see quite well in the dark       can hear well

with no disability    twirls round and round

like a merry-go-round

I wonder if suffering    looks like the slobber of joy sometimes      around that time

people get fed up with despair    in despair

go to the other side      other side      there

people who come to pray    in front of a guardian god and receive

the precious tears of the donkey      never stop coming

Minoru Yoshioka1       appeared       from time to time

to eat a bowl of shaved ice with sweet beans

even a phantom gets thirsty

phantoms    appear all over the place

the peak of Mt. Yamamotoyama in Ojiya2 in deep fog

is no different from the London suburbs

he chanted     like a spell    the same English as at the time

he walked through the Kew Gardens

when the pronunciation stopped short    the fog cleared up

while eating a bowl of soba noodles      the donkey     kept a journal this far

we don’t know what will become of    tomorrow

nevertheless    there is also something I have understood

even a phantom gets thirsty.

1. Minoru Yoshioka is a close friend of Shiraishi, whom she considers the greatest of Japan’s surrealist poets. It is a Buddhist custom to make an offering to the dead of a token of his favorite food.

2. The modernist poet Junzaburo Nishiwaki’s home was in Ojiya, Niigata Prefecture, near the Mt. Yamamotoyama. He had studied in England as a young man and was familiar with Kew Garden.