‘But you do believe, don’t you,’ Rose implored him, you think it’s true?’ ‘Of course it’s true,’ the Boy said. ‘What else could there be?’ he went scornfully on. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘it’s the only thing that fits. These atheists, they don’t know nothing. Of course there’s Hell. Flames and damnation,’ he said with his eyes on the dark shifting water and the lightning and the lamps going out above the black struts of the Palace Pier, ‘torments.’ ‘And Heaven too,’ Rose said with anxiety, while the rain fell interminably on. ‘Oh, maybe,’ the Boy said, ‘maybe.’
By Hanabusa Ikkei
I thought to live Two centuries, or three — Yet here comes death To me, a child Just eighty-five years old.
Translated by Yoel Hoffmann, from Japanese Death Poems (1986). The original was written in Japanese.
This is a jisei — a Japanese death poem, a tradition practised for centuries by monks and samurai as they approached death. The convention was to compose a final verse reflecting on one’s life and impending departure, often in the form of a haiku or tanka.