Fish Leaping from a Dry Pool

A fish has come to a pool with hardly any water left. It jumps and lands in the waves. The third line says that hope must exist across some kind of separation, although the phrase is unclear and we read it plainly. Before anything else, the poem mentions worldly drudgery as something to reckon with.

Kichi, Good fortune, is what the book prints, and the leap gives that grade its force. The fish gets out of the drying pool in the second line, and the remaining two lines keep toil in view.

Offered as a thought for the present, this might be the moment of leaving a shrinking situation for a bigger and rougher one. Everyday labor tends to come along with such a leap.