Benjamin Rose is a poet from Washington, D. C. and the author of Elegy For My Youth (2023) and Dust Is Over All (2024). He graduated from CUA with a B. A. In English in 2024.
I read Manyō’shu
Before the warm summer sun
Filtered through the blinds,
Pausing on Hitomaro’s
Elegy for the drowned man.
Dead on the shoreline
Of the isle of Samine,
He lay separated
From his wife, his crab-pecked corpse
Rotting under the breaker.
The sea had flung him
On a bed of stones, to lie
There till his bones bleached
And crumbled into dust by
The margin of the whale-road.
Did she weep for you,
Sir, a thousand years since dead,
Whose waterlogged fate
Stings me into silence through
The verse of your elegist?
Or was it only
A month before new lips kissed
Her jasmine-white breasts
And coral-lined cheek, and you
Passed into oblivion?
Spring 2024