Kome no naki
Toki wa hisago ni
Ominaeshi.
—Basho
At a riceless time.
The gourd receptacle holds
An ominaeshi.
“Riceless times” for peasants and the poor were frequent in
seventeenth-century Japan. People then would eat barley, sweet
potatoes, or weeds from the field. The ominaeshi, a flower known
for its fragile beauty, is not inedible. The Chinese ideographs for
it can also be read musume no hanay which translated into English
is “maiden flower.” Basho, a priest, was very poor and depended
on his friends and disciples for food. A receptacle made from a
gourd was kept outside his dwelling into which rice and other
articles of food were put by the poet’s admirers.