Night,
and the warble of frogs
among the bulrushes
wreathes the battlements.
Moonlight spills across the towers
like a cold pool of milk,
and I suffer still the passage of this time
out of now into nowhere.
The dead hosts encamp about me,
yet not even the whispering grass
and mute stones remember their names.
But there,
in the sky-filled window,
her ivory visage is framed--
the woman in the dream--
who I lost from life this night
a thousand summers past.
A sad song like death
is rising in my ears,
or is it only the passage
of the zephyr through the empty tower?