Chiyojo - My little dragonfly hunter, where has he gone today, I wonder

蜻蛉釣り今日はどこまで行ったやら is a parent's sentence at dusk. The child is out at the game of catching dragonflies, and how far did he get today, I wonder. The Japanese has no my, no little, no son and no death; it stops where any parent stops, with the child not yet home. Since 1816 the line has been read as Chiyojo's verse for her dead child, and it is the verse Issa wrote her name under in the year his own daughter died. It is not in the two collections printed in her lifetime, and the Japanese references hold the story as legend. The grief is real, and the poem leaves it in the silence after the question.