Last night (trying to meet this Friday deadline), I opened the program and spread out my notes. Since the week before, I had wanted to write something about the damage caused by the tornadoes in Oklahoma. I went online to review some of the details and was caught up in a maelstrom of Breaking News as yet another set of tornadoes was moving through that area.

More people died, more were injured — the destruction deepened. After more than an hour of listening to reporters and meteorologists, of moving among news and chaser and social media sites, of viewing live video from 1,500 miles away, I was done in. Sorrowful and anxious — truly weary — I was in no mood to write up a post about anything, let alone tornadoes. There are several lessons I’ve yet to learn about becoming overwhelmed by our online and real-time worlds. Their spacious arrays of information and novelty also burden.

What did I want to say about last week’s tornadoes (made more piercingly necessary by last night’s)? Rather naively, I had searched at the Poetry Foundation site for poems marked by the keyword wind. Five brief lines from tenth century Japan (translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani) appeared near the top of the results:

Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.

Terrible winds, damaged buildings, loss of protection, lack of shelter — and a certain undefinable sadness. Then, a metaphor; now, actually present.

The poem comes from centuries away, from the heady and heated environment of the Japanese Imperial Court. It has been collected with dozens of similarly brief pieces written by Izumi Shikibu. Many of them have to do with love; others with loss. I think all of them, truly, are about both.

The moments and years counted out, with some relationships ending and others beginning to emerge. Shikibu was writing about the landscape — her landscape — of personal and court relationships, of her husbands and lovers. She wrote eloquently about those deeply human connections and about their loss. She captured something profound about the beauty of the heartfelt longing that inevitably follows.

The folks in Oklahoma — our neighbors — must bury those who have died and care for those who have been injured. They face a monumental task in clearing away roof planks and rebuilding ruined houses. We do not always discover fulfillment where we hope to find it; our expectations are not always met.

Is it ever possible to see potential amid loss and destruction? Where would wholeness hide among the fragments of rubble?

No one of us need imagine what it feels like to be unfulfilled; we have only to remember.

Empty or open? Or both?

____________________

Izumi Shikibu (974–1034) was a poet who lived in and around the Japanese Imperial Court at Kyoto during a time of tremendous openness to artistic endeavor, to women, and to Buddhism. A brief passage from Jane Hirshfield’s introduction in The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Onono Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan suggests something of Shikibu’s remarkable and remarkably untamed life:

Born in 974, she was the daughter of a lord. Despite her marriage to a provincial official and the birth of a daughter, Shikibu began a passionate liaison with the empress’s stepson; the resulting scandal left her divorced and disowned by her family. Three years later, a year after her first lover had died, his brother, Prince Atsumichi, sent Shikibu an exploratory poem, and thus began a still greater love.

Shikibu’s legacy? Her poems are revered a millennium after her death. And, Hirshfield notes, serve as “absolutely accurate and moving descriptions of our most common and central experiences … it is our own lives we find illuminated in them.”

(“Tornado, Oklahoma City, May” ca. 1913-1917) // from the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division // Harris & Ewing Collection