Kazuko M.

a little crowd of snowdrops, happy and open in the sunlight

Snowdrop days

"I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now.
One does, I think, as one gets older."
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

(image: Mikiko Noji/ photo: V. Woolf)

"Walking,
still walking;
the spring wind."

(image: Koukei Kojima)

a serene blue-grey river reflecting the sky. empty trees line the banks. a lighthouse folly the river around the bend.

Dreamy hour on the river

snowdrops bundled up and closed against the gloomy skies

little winter aconite closed up but still bright yellow

I wasn’t expecting these until a little later yet here they are. The forecast is saying days of rain which I have no doubt they’ll love.

Good evening...

Dear March—Come in—
How glad I am—
I hoped for you before—
Put down your Hat—
You must have walked—
How out of Breath you are—

Dear March—Come in—(1320) poets.org/poem/dear-ma...

[photo: Emily Dickinson/ image: Hoshun Yamaguchi]

Daffodils with sun behind

Daffs in the cemetery

"No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify
the mass slaughter of innocents." Edward Said

A Siamese cat looking at the camera from a flower bed next to a white brick wall

Chillin

"There is no other road ―
Spring snow falling." Santoka

(image: Shiro Kasamatsu)

Rainy blurry headlights streetlights night-time asphalt noir 1920s Berlin

A lone walker crossing a dim rainy blurry night-time street in 1920s noir Berlin

A line of taxis lined up along the overhead subway tracks of Bülowstrasse in a rainy blurry noir of night

Three Berlin impressionist noir paintings by Lesser Ury (1861 - 1931) at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam

"when there are mountains, I look at mountains
when there is a rainy day, I listen to the rain"
― Santoka (tr. Gabi Greve)

(images: Hasui Kawase)

"the sky I see
seems full of
magnolia blossoms"
― Soseki Natsume, Kusamakura (草枕＝grass pillow)

(image: Hokusai)

"What shall I do with this ageing me?
Neither floating nor sinking, I drift,
tossed by the waves of years."
―Takuboku Ishikawa, Romaji Diary and Sad Toys

(image: Suizan Miki)

A screech-owl, its feathers etched like bark and its eyes twin embers, perches amid a tangle of skeletal branched in twilight—Arthur Rackham’s haunting omen from Jorinda and Joringel.

“A screech-owl with glowing eyes flew three times round her, and cried three times ‘Shu hu-hu.’”

(Grimm)

🎨 Arthur Rackham

#goldenageofillustration #booksky #bookillustration #owlishmonday

Fabulous!

Essayistic Grace

I have read (and reread) eleven of Pascal Quignard's books on my shelves and have written about him for fourteen years on this blog, probably more often than I've written about any writer except Beckett and Woolf. Yet, once read, I never retain him: no favourite passages that keep…

"Of late the nights
are dawning
plum-blossom white." Buson Yosa

(images: Koson Ohara / Harunobu Suzuki)

"Walking the sky
a clear moon
all alone" Seisensui Ogiwara

(Plum blossom & Moon, Koson Ohara)

"There is nothing you can see that is not a flower;
There is nothing you can think that is not the moon." ― Basho Matsuo (tr. R.H.Blyth)

(image: Hoitsu Sakai)

& the wearing gears of a long month, sleet at dawn & thin hill snow - dead badger at the bridge & 1st hesitant movements of a thrush's early song

"Born as a spider
No choice but to spin
His spider web" Kyoshi Takahama

(image: Mt. Fuji through a spider's web, Hokusai)

fantastic!

"all sorts of fools
moon-gaze too...
winter prayers" Issa Kobayashi

(image: Hiroshige Utagawa)

'Milton is credited with coining more new words even than Shakespeare (630 to Shakespeare's 229), and "freaked" is one of them, denoting the untidy-looking black blotch on a pansy's petals.'

John Carey, 'A Little History of Poetry'

"dark night --
the first snowflakes
hit my neck" Issa Kobayashi

(image: Shotei Takahashi)