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Graduating

After seven years of continuing these training sessions, a turning point has arrived.

This poem, “Graduating,” tells not only the story of one who finishes a role, but also of those who begin anew.

 

Standing alongside community welfare and child welfare volunteers—people closest to the struggles and quiet pains within their communities—the poet has handed them poems not merely as texts, but as seeds of reflection and keys to the heart.

 

Parting is not an ending.

From repaying a kindness to passing kindness forward—

the poem gently suggests that graduation is not about completion, but about entrusting a calling so that it may continue to circulate in the world.

 

 Graduating

 

For seven years

I have continued training sessions

for newly appointed community and child welfare volunteers.

This winter marks the last.

 

Hidaka, Tokachi, Sorachi, Kamikawa, Ishikari—

completed.

Abashiri was left undone,

halted by harsh weather.

 

Until now

I had not spoken words of farewell.

In Wakkanai (Soya),

for the first time,

I spoke of graduation and gratitude.

It became a milestone—

half the districts now behind me.

 

Ahead lie Iburi, Oshima, Hiyama, and Nemuro.

In March, I will travel

to Shiribeshi, Rumoi, and Kushiro.

I can only hope

the weather does not interfere.

 

The poetry collections prepared as training texts

now number three volumes.

Perhaps they have been read

more than any in these past seven years.

The total will exceed seven thousand copies.

Printing costs alone

would have been impossible to bear personally.

I feel nothing but gratitude.

 

Even if they soon become

mere weight on a bookshelf,

I am thankful

if only once they were opened and read.

Participants offer heartfelt impressions.

At times they see themselves in a poem

and wipe away tears.

 

One struggled with her first-year high school daughter

who refused to attend school.

She worried, desperate

for her to go.

Surely the daughter’s pain

ran deeper still.

When the girl returned to school,

she felt relief.

 

“At that time,

my feelings were fixed only on wanting her to attend.”

“I had nothing but words of persuasion.”

“But perhaps, Teacher,

it would have been enough

just to hold her silently.”

 

She left saying

she wanted to read the poem ‘I Want to Hold You’

together with her daughter.

 

An encounter with “a single poem”

clarifies one’s questions:

Why did I accept this role?

Toward what am I walking?

One moving poem

reflects the heart as it is now.

Words do not vanish;

they continue to stir the heart.

After wrestling inwardly,

one finds something—

and walks home

with a lighter face.

 

Some were urged earnestly

by those to whom they owed much.

Some accepted the role

as an act of repayment.

The words I offer upon graduating

become the summation of the training:

 

From repaying kindness,

become one who passes kindness

out into the world—

a person truly needed.


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