This poem is in the classic Japanese 5-7-5-7-7 form.

White chrysanthemums
Off set the dark sky above
Yet in his fond dream
It had been her spread white frock
Beneath a sky of azure.

He picked one sweet bloom
And held its fragility
Whispering her name
As if to conjure the dead
For she knows him now no more.

There’s no such thing as a lover’s vow
For passion is wayward and blind
As a barque that sets its handsome prow
With no mind for the current under its bow
Or the storms on the main it will find.

As for feelings high or feelings low
The currents that run through one’s mind
As clouds that form then surprisingly go
Or tempests arising that awkwardly blow
They are paradoxically kind

For we are the beasts that roam and roar
In a passion of fury and sound
That issues from out of a soul that’s sore
Knowing neither whence nor yet wherefore
Lacking even an inch of ground.

So body and mind are not mine to plight
Although I give you my throth
For I am the creature that lost the fight
And fell into eternal night
In the spell of Amida’s oath

This poem also apears at http://dharmainafrica.blogspot.com 

Africa now knows you as a mother knows her own
And as she’s always known you since you went away from home
And there you see her standing – tresses crowned with that red comb
That was given by a lover on one silver afternoon
When the sunset hardly threatened yet the sand already blown
Had brought a haze across the dunes where seed cannot be sown
And your dreams were not yet born then nor yet hatched out from your bone
But their birth pangs had fore-echoes in the redness of her moon
For her lovers they are legion and they are not alone
When they come beneath her shelter and her canopy of stone
Like a womb of light eternal from which kindnesses are grown
At the endtime whose beginning is a gong that’s sounding soon.

This poem also appears at http://dharmainafrica.blogspot.com/

I have never been to Africa
But I have felt its hot red wind
Like the caress of a mother
Whose wrath has been pinned
By the light of the Buddha
Round a child who has sinned

I have never seen the rise
Of the sun on the veldt
But I’ve been in the desert
Where the land has lost its pelt
And the footfall of prophets
On the sand can still be felt

I have never been abandoned
No I’ve never been alone
Since those days when I would ponder
On the meaning of a stone
Through all these days wherein to wander
With You, my Lord without a throne.

No I’ve never been abandoned
And I’ve felt Your hot red breeze
And I’ve known Your hand upon me
Like a voice that says, “At ease”
Or a guarantee of passage
Through a swarm of angry bees.

No I’ve never been to Africa
Nor sat there in that shade
That You’ve set up in the leeside
Of the temple that they made
Where the master sips his tea
And the debt of sin is paid.

But I send there all my loving
And I send there all my care
As we walk upon the dune ridge
With the One who’s always there
And we set the bees a-sleeping
In the comfort of His hair.