Sticks of Incense

There's a lot I thought about writing today.  My own grief of course, recent ruminations on attachment and sacrifice, our unwillingness to betray our grief and the need to prove we were loved.  All these topics seem to want to be put to paper or blog but I fear co-opting you, gentle readers, which would prevent this entry from being the offering I mean it to be.  Instead I will offer you two poems I found while doing a little cleanup around Sara's poetry bookcase and let the works speak for themselves.

From "Japanese Death Poems" compiled by Yoel Hoffman and published by Tutle Publishing, Boston, MA:

Kozan Ichikyo

Died on the twelfth day of the second month of the year 1360 at the age of seventy-seven:

Empty-handed I entered the world,
Barefoot I leave it.
My coming, my going -
Two simple happenings
That got entangled

A few days before his death Kozan called his pupils together, ordered them to bury him without ceremony, and forbade them to hold services in his memory.  He wrote this poem on the morning of his death, laid down his brush, and died sitting upright.

While Sara would have felt similarly about ceremonies and services, she would never deny her friends the chance to throw a party. 

From "The Golden Treasury" compiled by Francis T. Palgrave and published by Dodge Publishing Company, NY:

Time and Love

When I have seen by time's fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of out-worn buried age;
When sometimes lofty towers I see down-razed,
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;

When I have seen the eternal ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store;

When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay,
Ruin has taught me thus to ruminate-
That Time will come and take my Love away;

-This thought is a death which cannot choose
but weep to have that which it fears to loose.

W. Shakespeare