Finding Serenity

1

This spring, the sky is leaking,
clouds hang thick and heavy;
we'll have one day of deceptive clearing,
then ten days of cloud.
Tree after tree of crab-apple flowers,
weeping tears of red:
they seem to be lamenting to us,
" This rain is hard to take! "

2

In old age, life's affairs
are supposed to leave one at peace;
how could I foresee that every morning
as soon as I wake, there's grief?
Requests for inscriptions, calls for forewords,
poems to be written on paintings:
busy as ever in the world of men,
I coldly meet their requests.

3

Setting brush to paper has always been hard
because I want perfection:
each poem I'll change a thousand times
before I am content.
The matron it seems continues to act
like an adolescent girl β€”
until her hair is perfectly combed
no one's allowed to look.

4

In snow and mud the goose leaves prints
then flies off hurriedly:
catching sight, it's hard to keep
my old eyes from reddening.
A letter from my family, written sixty years past,
suddenly falls floating from the pages of my book.

5

Become an immortal? Become a Buddha?
β€” It's all so hard to tell!
I'll just go and transform again
in the Creator's furnace.
But if I do appear before the Emperor of Jade,
I'll ask, " Now, really, beyond the sky,
is there another sky? "
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Author of original: 
Yβ”œβ•an Mei
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