Short Poems

Green weeds have overgrown the rainy footpath,
in the frost-filled garden red leaves abound.
Lonely and silent, the marshal's house —
no one comes to its gate and alley.
It just sits looking out on the waters of the great river,
autumn winds and the morning and evening waves.

That " Song of Everlasting Regret " has a romantic ring;
the ten Ch'in-chung-yin works are close to what poetry ought to be.
Old Yüan goes on stealing my old-poetry style,
but I've got " Little Li " completely dazzled by my songs.
Wealth and eminence will never be my lot in life,
but when I'm gone these writings will surely bring fame.
Don't be startled at the big words and boastful tone —
I've just finished putting together fifteen chapters of my poems!

By the west eaves I rested from drafting edicts,
pines and bamboos wrapped in deep stillness.
Then the moon came up, a fresh breeze began to blow,
and suddenly it was like an evening in the mountains.
That was why I dreamt of the southwest,
dreamt I was on an outing to Hsien-yu Temple.
And when I woke and heard the sound of the palace water clock,
I still thought it was the trickling of a mountain stream.

Autumn moonlight on bed curtains, your night tears melting in darkness;
peonies in the garden — springtime ache of prolonged sorrow —
in this world, no medicine to cure these ills,
only the four chapters of the Lankavatara Sutra.

Blossom time, drunk together, banishing spring sorrow;
drunk, we broke off flowering limbs, counters for our rounds of wine.
Suddenly I remembered my old friend, gone to the edge of the sky:
by my reckoning, today he must have reached Liang-chou.

On a plum tree blooming by a stream:
This stream that
through the years
has played mirror to the blossoms —
will they cloud it,
scattering their dust of petals?

For the parents of a dead child
You fondled him
piggybacked him
reared him, fed him the breast —
and today bear him away
to the withered fields

Those who were here are gone,
and the gone grow in number —
in this world I sorrow,
wondering how long
I myself can go on sighing

No way to meet him,
no moon to light his way,
I wake up with longing,
my chest a raging fire,
my heart in flames

In waking hours
natural perhaps,
but even in dreams —
how miserable, to be forever hiding
from the eyes of others