A pear tree is blooming, By a collapsed house, on an old battlefield^[1] nashi saku ya ikusa no ato no kuzure ie 梨さくや 戦のあとの 崩れ家 shiki 子規

Masaoka Shiki's verse sets two things side by side and says nothing about either. The pear trees bloom because it is spring. The house has fallen in because a battle passed there. Readers have praised its calm: a scene after a war, with no grief pressed on it. The battle was not long ago. It had been fought five months before.

In the Japanese, 梨, the pear, is the season word, for its white spring blossom, and さくや, blooms, is the cut. あと is after, and it can also mean the traces of a thing, the ground where it stood. The second の ties the house to the battle. Some of the hands write いくさ, battle, in kana, and one writes くずれ in kana too. Some write 崩家 without the れ, an artistic choice that reads the same.

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".

References:

[1] After R. H. Blyth, Haiku, vol. 1 (Hokuseido Press, 1949), p. 177.

The verse is Shiki's own, written in his own hand at 金州 in the spring of 1895, where he had gone as a war correspondent as the Sino-Japanese War was ending, and first printed in 1902 in the selection of his verses he made himself.