FALLING LEAVES & PAST LIVES

ISBN 978-1-7391919-4-8

Travelling through Japan and China in the spring of 2025, the first Falling Leaves drifted in and were jotted down before they lifted into the wind again. In the second section, Past Lives, I gathered  a number of short poems, many of them written long ago, but which had never found a place in previous collections. Some of them are formal haiku, many are simply something caught in the breath of a moment, but I’m astonished how clear, and sometimes poignant, their memories are. To quote from Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji, ‘It was a time when the skies would have brought poignant thoughts in any case, and a falling leaf could take one back to things of long ago.’