A Reply to the Academics

I love how the old Chinese poets cut the mustard and got directly to the point in their poems. One of my favorites is Tao Yuan Ming, who left an official post to return to his farm and write poems. He wrote many poems about solitude, his garden, the inner world. And he tended that inner world with care and intensity.

He wrote about spiritual poverty in a way that seems startling to me. In the end, how much do we need? A bookcase with a dozen books; perhaps a dozen songs; twelve months of the year lived fully. Here's a poem of his in my translation from The Deer is Thirsty for the Mountain Stream.

A REPLY TO THE ACADEMICS

All things have a place to return to at dusk,
but this thin cloud has no resting place;
winds rise and it's gone.
When will I see it again, transparent, filled with light?
The red dawn opens the night mist;
hundreds of birds go about their daily business.
One crow flies out from its stickly nest
and returns just before nightfall.
To live like the others, to follow the accepted roads
is to go cold and hungry inside.
If no one knows how I live,
so what? Grief means nothing to me now.

The next post will include a few ecstatic love poems by Lin Chu. These are new versions, and are similar in tone to some of the Sufi poets, particularly Rumi.

(Copyright Allan Cooper, 1992, 2006)