Out of Reach, You and Me

Though you and we are physically close, we are far too distant in genes,
and the roles our differences bear are like front and back.

Whenever our lives overlap, it always becomes an exchange of life.
No matter how beautiful we find you, we cannot convey it.

We each live in worlds - one without mercy, one with compassion.
Between them, we live our days caught in between.
It is an eternal one-sided love for you, never reaching across even when we touch.

Even if we say we will not make you our enemy, the law of nature does not change,
and there can never be true understanding between you and us.

No matter how much we love you, we can only live the path of humans.
The acts of meeting we can share are limited to the exchange of life.

To live together is not only to hold hands,
but also to take each other's lives -
and this too is a bond that weaves the harmony of the whole, as you have taught us.

You take on that law, and in the work of restoring the soil -
opened and blended by human hands -
we offer our respect and our prayers.

* This song carries empathy and gratitude for those who, with heavy hearts, take the lives of insects in order to fulfill their role of protecting crops.

It is said that in some regions, insects too are believed to carry the souls of ancestors during Obon, together with the spirit horses made of summer vegetables.

Thinking of this "Obon of the insects", where those who once lived in a relationship of taking each other's lives on earth now share a sacred role, this song becomes a prayer:
the first verse with the voices of insects, the second verse with the voices of humans, layered together like two hands.