Andrew’s poem, “Forgetting-grass”, was published in the 3-4 January 2015 issue of The Weekend Australian Review. The same poem, under the simplified (and preferred) title “Forgetting”, is scheduled for publication later this year in the Inkerman & Blunt anthology, Prayers of a Secular World. It is reproduced below:

Forgetting-grass

‘I long to pick/ Some forgetting-grass’ –

Ki no Tsurayuki, The Tosa Diary, 935 AD

 

For you I need a different flower,

brother, than the blue forget-me-nots.

 

Oh, here in this world where you left me

I yearn for the sweet forgetting-grass

 

treasured by the ancient Japanese.

I want to search out and gather up

 

those grasses that take away grieving

by somehow infusing forgetting.

 

I want stooks of the stuff, large wigwam

stooks that can be shaken loose and strewn

 

to cover me with stalk, leaf and scent

from the loss of you and how you went.

                    © Andrew Lansdown