BLUE HORSE
Sunken murmurs come from the bottom of the sea.
A horse, blind in both eyes, can be seen
Through a crease of water.
The blue horse plods along the sea bottom;
the memory of a man on its back is almost entirely gone.
How long has this horse lived in the sea?
Is the blood splashed on its back its own?
One leg brushes aside clinging seaweed,
and the horse's blind eyes become
a far deeper and lonelier indigo than the sea.
It moves unpretentiously on.
Blood oozing from its wounded belly
is washed off by sea-water
and carried from wave to wave…
A cold fog rises from the sea in autumn—
by a rock at the sea bottom,
the horse crouches alone, legs folded,
enduring the cold;
enduring the wait.
date unspecified
Translated by
KAJIMA HAJIME
The
only information I can find about Japanese poet Masako Takaguchi (I place her given name before her surname in the English style) comes
from Modern Japanese Women Poets: After the Meiji Restoration, an article by Ikuko Atsumi published in Volume 7, Issue 2 of The Iowa Review in
1976. It is posted here for information purposes only and remains its
author's exclusive copyright-protected intellectual property.
Takiguchi (1919–?) has a more artistic sense than most of the social group [of female Japanese poets who were her contemporaries]. Since she lost everything, visible and invisible, during the war in Korea, where she had lived for twenty years, her poems are full of bitter pain. Blue Horse, her representative poem, forms a prototype of her thought in her solitary time to dream of the cold flames… There is a poem titled On Man, in which Takaguchi writes on the cruelty of man, who feels nothing but physical desire for woman, and also a poem titled At The Slaughterhouse, in which a woman's body makes love with man only because of his sexual desire. Her body and the body of a cow killed at the slaughterhouse are overlapped. Both are interesting pieces from the viewpoint of feminism.
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