Kaguya's Tears

Beyond the sky, from where moonlight is sent, The Princess Kaguya lifts her luminous head. From her celestial palace, cold and high, She gazes down through veils of starlit sky.

She remembers: the bamboo’s whispered song, The mortal years she walked the earth so long, The tender hands that raised her, worn and kind, The human hearts she had to leave behind.

And when the full moon crowns Mount Fuji’s peak, When silver clouds across the heavens streak, Her ancient sorrow rises like the tide - For all the love she lost, for all who died.

She weeps for gardens she will never tend, For autumn leaves, for hands she’ll never mend, For laughter shared beneath the cherry trees, For earthbound joys the moon cannot.

Her tears fall slow, like petals made of light, Descending through the fabric of the night. They drift on winds no mortal breath can feel, Each droplet wrapped in lunar mother-of-pearl.

The artisans who watch on sacred eves,
Who know the old ways woven through the leaves, Will catch these tears in bowls of jade and stone, Before they vanish, moonlight overthrown.

And from these fragments of celestial grief, They craft a serum, precious and brief - A gift that holds the glow of distant spheres, The beauty born of Kaguya’s endless years.

Those who receive this blessing, pure and rare, Find moonlight blooming soft upon their hair, A radiance that speaks of worlds above, A final gift: the exiled princess’s love.

For though she dwells where mortals cannot climb, Beyond the reach of death, beyond all time, Her heart remembers still the earthly clay, And weeps for those she loved, and loves today.

So watch the mountain on the moonlit night, When silver tears rain down in ghostly light - Each one a memory, a whispered prayer, That Kaguya sends from her palace in the air.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​