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So lonely am I
My body is a floating weed
Severed at the roots.
Were there water to entice me,
I would follow it, I think.

— Ono no Komachi Donald Keene's Anthology of Japanese Literature (1955)

Wabinureba
Mi wo ukigusa no
Ne wo taete
Sasou mizu araba
Inamu to zo omou

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Notes from Wikiquote

p. 79

More quotes by Ono no Komachi

Imperceptible
It withers in the world,
This flower-like human heart.

One Hundred Poems from the Japanese (1955)

The flowers and my love
Passed away under the rain,
While I idly looked upon them
Where is my yester-love?

Yone Noguchi's The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (1914)

Although I come to you constantly
over the roads of dreams,
those nights of love
are not worth one waking touch of you.

Women Poets of Japan (1982)

I fell asleep thinking of him,
and he came to me.
If I had known it was only a dream
I would never have awakened.

Women Poets of Japan (1982)

Autumn nights, it seems,
are long by repute alone:
scarcely had we met
when morning's first light appeared,
leaving everything unsaid.

Kokin Wakashū: The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry (1985)

All Ono no Komachi quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Ono no Komachi (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.