Far From Flowers

a poem by Muso Soseki

Toki-no-Ge (Satori Poem)

Year after year

     I dug in the earth

          looking for the blue of heaven

only to feel

    the pile of dirt

         choking me

until once in the dead of night

    I tripped on a broken brick

        and kicked it into the air

and saw that without a thought

    I had smashed the bones

        of the empty sky

(from Sun At Midnight, Poems and Sermons of Muso Soseki, translated by W.S. Merwin and Soiku Shigematsu, North Point Press 1989)