samurai song

here is a poetic piece of Robert Pinsky..i liked it and hope you too will like
ROBERT PINSKYOD. 1940)


Robert Pinsky was born in Long Branch, New Jersey. He was educated at Rutgers and studied
with Yvor Winters at Stanford. He has written, in addition to poetry, several books of criticism
and an acclaimed translation of Dante's Inferno. As U.S. poet laureate, he started the Favorite
Poem Project, a video and audio archive featuring Americans from all walks of life reading their
favorite poems. The third stanza of Pinsky's "Ode to Meaning" is in the form of an abecedarius,
recapitulating the alphabet. The impetus for "Samurai Song" came from hearing a welder
in Salina, Kansas, read a fourteenth-century Japanese poem based on the formula "When I . . .
then I . . ."

Samurai Song

When I had no roof I made
Audacity my roof. When I had
No supper my eyes dined.
When I had no eyes I listened.
When I had no ears I thought.
When I had no thought I waited.
When I had no father I made
Care my father. When I had no
Mother I embraced order.
When I had no friend I made
Quiet my friend. When I had no
Enemy I opposed my body.
When I had no temple I made
My voice my temple. I have
No priest, my tongue is my choir.
When I have no means fortune
Is my means. When I have
Nothing, death will be my fortune.
Need is my tactic, detachment
Is my strategy. When I had
No lover I courted my sleep.