Haiku by Shiki

A pear tree is blooming,
By a collapsed house,
on an old battlefield

梨さくや戦のあとの崩れ家 (nashi saku ya ikusa no ato no kuzure ie): pear trees in bloom, and a house fallen in, after the battle. 梨 is the pear, whose white blossom is a spring season word; さくや, *blooms, and*, is the cut; いくさ is *battle*, and the second の binds *after the battle* to 崩れ家, a house fallen in, a compound the poet made for it. Nothing in the Japanese says *old*: あと is *after*, and the after was five months. Shiki wrote it in the spring of 1895 at Jinzhou (金州) on the Liaodong peninsula, where he had gone as a war correspondent in the month the Sino-Japanese War ended, standing where the battle of the previous November had been fought. It is in his own hand in his manuscript collection Kanzan Rakuboku, under the headnote *two verses at Jinzhou*, beside its pair, an old pear tree sparse in flower by a leek field. Hekigotō, his first critic, read the Jinzhou verses in 1907 as calm and without bluster: scenes after a war, with nothing pressed. On two of the designs Master Takase brushes いくさ in kana, as Shiki's manuscript does; the words are the same. The English is Timothy L. Jackowski's, made for Takase Studios.

In reading this poem I always think of the landmarks in central Virginia indicating important battles from the civil war. Each time the landscape before me is breathtakingly beautiful. And it is so hard to imagine what had happened there in the past.

People are this way too. Everyone has had difficulties even though the scars don't always show. Many times we only see the person as they are now, a pear tree in bloom, and we forget that each person has fought their share of battles.

Calligraphy Notes:

1) ikusa is commonly written in kanji as 戦 and in hiragana as いくさ. I have used both in the designs.

2) Similarly I have used kuzure in both kanji as 崩れ and in hiragana as くずれ.

Translation Notes:

1) 梨 (nashi) means "pear" and, specifically, "pear tree".

2) さく (saku) in this case means "to bloom".

3) 戦のあと (ikusa no ato) meaning "ruins (remains) of a battle". 戦 (ikusa) means "war; battle; campaign; fight". あと (ato) in this case means "ruins; remains".

4) 崩れ (kuzure) meaning "crumbling; collapse; ruin".

5) 家 (ie) meaning "house; dwelling".