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I Am Like a Leaf

1875 –

1947

The silence is broken: into the nature
My soul sails out,
Carrying the song of life on his brow,
To meet the flowers and birds.

When my heart returns in the solitude,
She is very sad,
Looking back on the dead passions
Lying on Love’s ruin.

I am like a leaf
Hanging over hope and despair,
Which trembles and joins
The world’s imagination and ghost.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on December 28, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Yone Noguchi, the first Japanese-born writer to publish poetry in English, was born in 1875 in Tsushima. He lived and worked in San Francisco, and was the author of numerous books of poetry and prose. He died Toyooka-mura on July 13, 1947.

Themes

About this Poem

“I Am Like a Leaf” was originally published in Selected Poems of Yone Noguchi ” (The Four Seas Company, 1921).

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More by this poet

[The faint shadow of the morning moon?]

The faint shadow of the morning moon?
Nay, the snow falling on the earth.
The mist of blossoming flowers?
Nay, poetry smiling up the sky.

Yone Noguchi

1920

How Near to Fairyland

The spring warmth steals into me, drying up all the tears of my soul,
And gives me a flight into the vastness,—into a floorless, unroofed reverie-hall.

Lo, such greenness, such velvety greenness, such a heaven without heaven above!
Lo, again, such grayness, such velvety grayness, such an earth without earth below!
My soul sails through the waveless mirror-seas.

Yone Noguchi

1921

Where is the Poet

The inky-garmented, truth-dead Cloud—woven by dumb ghost alone in the darkness of
phantasmal mountain-mouth—kidnapped the maiden Moon, silence-faced,
love-mannered, mirroring her golden breast in silvery rivulets:
The Wind, her lover, grey-haired in one moment, crazes around the Universe, hunting
her dewy love-letters, strewn secretly upon the oat-carpets of the open field.

Yone Noguchi

1921

Poems

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I Am Like a Leaf

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