Short Poems

“Dark fragrance, sparse shadows,”
east of the zigzag balustrade:
a thousand trees of flowering plum,
a single old man.
White hair like white blossoms,
white blossoms like snow;
late at night, in the moonlight,
it's hard to tell the difference.

Dark, dark, far mists rise;
swish, swish, sparse woods echo.
Setting sun, west mountains disappear;
a man is plowing the ancient plain.

The commonplace I sing;
How cheap is health! how cheap nobility!
Abstinence, no falsehood, no gluttony, lust;
The open air I sing, freedom, toleration,
(Take here the mainest lesson--less from books--less from the schools,)
The common day and night--the common earth and waters,
Your farm--your work, trade, occupation,
The democratic wisdom underneath, like solid ground for all.

On the Refusal of the University of Oxford to Subscribe to his Translation of Homer

Could Homer come himself, distress'd and poor,
And tune his harp at Rhedicina's door,
The rich old vixen would exclaim (I fear)
Begone! no tramper gets a farthing here.

The cool of bamboo invades my room;
moonlight from the fields fills the corners of the court;
dew gathers till it falls in drops;
a scattering of stars, now there, now gone
A firefly threading the darkness makes its own light;
birds at rest on the water call to each other;
all these lie within the shadow of the sword —
Powerless I grieve as the clear night passes.

Coming and going, no fixed lodging,
over rivers and seas, wherever wind and mist take me.
Nights I stay in a temple among the peaks,
mornings make for the Mao Lake boat.
Green hills — and as I turn my head,
white birds in front of the sail winging away.
Ten years a traveler in a foreign land —
wordless, I stand lost in thought.

Dead in the cold, a song-singing thrush,
Dead at the foot of a snowberry bush--
Weave him a coffin of rush,
Dig him a grave where the soft mosses grow,
Raise him a tombstone of snow.

DAvid, the king, was grieved and moved,
He went to his chamber, his chamber, and wept.
And as he went, he wept and said,
" O my son, O my son!
Would to God I had died, would to God I had died,
Would to God I had died for thee,
O Absalom, my son, my son. "

Dasius, chucker-out
at the Turkish Baths,
is a shrewd assessor;
when he saw big-titted
Spatale coming, he decided
to charge her entry for three
persons. What did she do?
Paid with pride of course.

Dark hills at evening in the west,
Where sunset hovers like a sound
Of golden horns that sang to rest
Old bones of warriors under ground,
Far now from all the bannered ways
Where flash the legions of the sun,
You fade — as if the last of days
Were fading, and all wars were done.