For seven hundred years, Japanese poetry has required a seasonal word — cherry blossoms, autumn grasses, the sound of a frog — to anchor the poem in the world's rhythms. But Mt. Fuji went snowless last November for the first time in 130 years, and a summer horse festival was moved to May because the heat was dangerous. Marie Mutsuki Mockett uses this unraveling as an entry point into something older: what we inherit from the people we come from, and what we do when the world they handed us no longer holds.
Marie Mutsuki Mockett
https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/five-hundred-words/