Today's poem

The Courtesan Jigoku Dayū sees herself as a skeleton in the mirror of Hell by Abigail Parry

In yesterday's mourning, the television had stayed on, and I was grabbed by the introduction of the exhibition of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (月岡芳年, 1839-1892) in a TV program. He was an ukiyo-e artist, active from the end of the Edo era to the early Meiji era. I thought that my current poem Carnivorous Butterwort (https://bit.ly/2ZTVits) could evoke Tsukioka's images. All of a sudden, the British poet Abigail Parry's ekphrastic poem on his work came up in my mind:  'The Courtesan Jigoku Dayū sees herself as a skeleton in the mirror of Hell' in her collection JINX. In particular, the first three couplets in the poem are splendid with the line 'Splender key without a lock, / a speaking clock that will not speak', maybe I can't use such a setting of the persons in the stanzas, for my mother tongue might be Japanese. Who or what is a subject? - I should always be conscious of the question to myself whenever writing in English. Is this because I might not usually be conscious of the subject in Japanese? Anyway, her word games are shining.

Please listen to her reading of the poem in the Bloodaxe video clip 'Abigail Parry reading from JINX' (around the time 12:40).
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/jinx-1174

Here is the ukiyo-e of 'The Courtesan Jigoku Dayū sees herself'.
https://bit.ly/3cjQVwA

And if you are in Japan now, you can see the exhibition of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi: Blood and the Bewitching in the following.
(Japanese version)   https://bit.ly/3cfAXUt
(English version)      https://bit.ly/3iOqZvR