So long as we're traveling in poetry land...

The random web-walk that brought me to reminisce, last night, about Izumi Shikibu, had me drinking my draught of refreshed memory at Beautiful and Depraved. It's one of those blogs that proves "not safe for work" can also mean moving. In addition to remind me to pay attention to my old love of Shikibu, Beautiful & Depraved also put a new (to me) fragment of a more recent favourite poet in my face: One thousand half loves Must be foresaken To follow one whole heart home. Rumi So many people have written to me about the Shikibu lines, I feel obliged to mention that the other poet represented in The Ink Dark Moon is just as wonderful: Ono No Komatchi, who lived just slightly earlier than Shikibu. I thought to pick the flower of forgetting for myself, but I found it already growing in his heart. Ono No Komatchi