Maria Concetta Conti (Italy)

back home
even october has
its own flowers

Comment: an autumn ku with warm and emotionally grounded tones. The poet has returned home just to find in the garden a series of flowers and plants typical this time of year. A real saijiki 歳時記 (‘almanac of annual events’) takes shape before her eyes, flooding them with bright and vibrant colors, as if nature itself welcomed her back. The repetition of the sounds ‘e’ and ‘o’ in the second part of the poem reinforces an overall sense of tranquility (seijaku 静寂) and openness, even in the underlying and omnipresent awareness of the transience of things. The protagonist looks at nature and at its endless transformations with constantly new eyes (note the pivoting word ‘even’), according to a fresh, original aesthetic immersion (tanbi 耽美).