So I kind of understood indirection to be sort of metaphorical speak or a way of writing a poem in which emotions are understood but not explicitly stated. I chose this poem because it seems to be using phrases like "When the city is rotting" and "Feathered language / Heavy as freedom" to convey emotion without explicitly stating what that emotion is.

This is technically cheating because this poem is not in my anthology, but I believe it fits this chapter so perfectly I decided to put it anyway. It is also a translation from Polish, so it relates to the same concepts Hirshfield was talking about with Japanese poetry. Hirshfield states that a "basic attribute" of Japanese poetry is using the natural landscape to explore human feelings, and has a tradition of focusing on inner states in way Western poetry does not quite achieve. Szymborska's poem is an inversion of that, as she takes the natural landscape of Japan and reflects the United States' cruelty and hypocrisy in choosing Hiroshima (instead of Kyoto) to drop the atomic bomb on (Szymborksa herself was a war survivor as a native to Poland). The idea of a permanent, ancient landscape of Japan is flipped on its head as Szymborska discusses the modern amenities of Kyoto that deemed the city to valuable to demolish. This contrasts so highly with the Haiku by Bashō in 9G, which celebrates the song of the cuckoo as the speaker "longs for Kyoto".