OISHIDA, OR "GREAT STONEFIELD'

We wanted to go down the Mogami River in a boat, so we had to wait several days for fine weather at a place called Oishida.

The seed of the old-fashioned haikai linked verse had once been sown here, and the people still practiced that style of verse, in love with it and unable to forget the days of its flowering. Their muse was as rustic as the sound of a reed pipe, and they trod the path of poetry with faltering step, hesitating at the crossroads, not knowing which way to take-the old or the new. They needed someone to guide them, so I left them a set of linked verse.

Who would have thought that on this, my own poetic pilgrimage, I would also be spreading abroad the Basho style!