jouzai-de toru bitamin-ya kotori kuru

getting my vitamins

as pills ... migrating

birds arrive

Waraby Sayatome

From "Fuyoh" (Rose Mallow), Issue 83, March 2010, Fuyoh Haiku Group, Tokyo, 2010.

One by one the little packets of feathers drop out of the sky and into the fields on their annual migration, here to gain the nutrients to tide them over on their long flights from larder to larder. As the birds arrive, the pickings are still sparse. Each peck, each swallow gives them the vitamins and nutrients they need to survive.

The contrast is striking: The poet takes vitamins as pills -- concentrated, processed, removed from their natural sources -- while migrating birds gather theirs directly from the earth through patient foraging.

Yet there's a parallel. Both the poet and the birds are sustaining themselves for journeys, literal or metaphorical. The pills suggest age or illness, some inability to get what's needed from food alone. The migrating birds, newly arrived and still building strength, face their own precarity.

"Kotori" means small birds -- delicate creatures whose survival depends on finding enough fuel quickly. Their arrival marks the season's turn, nature's ancient cycle continuing as the poet manages health through modern medicine. The juxtaposition places two forms of survival side by side, noting how far human sustenance has drifted from the instinctive foraging that still governs the natural world.

Selected, translated and commented on by Dhugal J. Lindsay

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Pique your poetic interest with more Haiku in English here.