Short Poems

A bell in the mountain-temple sounds the coming of night.
I hear people at the fishing-town stumble aboard the ferry,
While others follow the sand-bank to their homes along the river,
… I also take a boat and am bound for Lu-mên Mountain—
And soon the Lu-mên moonlight is piercing misty trees.
I have come, before I know it, upon an ancient hermitage,
The thatch door, the piney path, the solitude, the quiet,
Where a hermit lives and moves, never needing a companion.

A tortoise I see on a lotus-flower resting;
A bird 'mid the reeds and the rushes is nesting;
A light skiff propelled by some boatman's fair daughter,
Whose song dies away o'er the fast-flowing water.

White plum blossoms—
who from long ago stands
outside the brushwood fence?

The Korean ship
not stopping, passing back
into the mist.

Sleeping on
the mother's back—
the pinwheel spins
even in the baby's
unconscious hand.

A bamboo path leads up from the lowland—
On lotus peaks emerges the Conjured City
From within a window all three Chu states;
Above the forests the nine level rivers
On soft grass monks sit cross-legged;
Tall pines echo their chanting sounds
Emptily dwelling beyond the Dharma cloud,
They contemplate the world, attaining non-rebirth.

Toward evening on East Hill gazing,
Hesitant, uncertain, nothing to depend on,
On tree after tree, the colors of autumn,
On mountain after mountain, radiance of the setting sun.
The herdsman turns back, driving his calves,
The hunter's horse returns, bearing a bird.
I look at them; I do not know them
A long song and a yearning to “pluck the bracken”

In the shallows—
cranes wetting their legs
coolness of the sea

The sea put a finger of foam on its lips of waves,
Saying, “Shh!” saying, “Hush!”

I that was vexed and unquiet,
Heard, and was soothed.

Bitter, bitter,
A night that kills with a perishing wind,
The cold soaks the tight houses, fighting the fires …

The air about the street-lamps is blue with cold,
The moon's a disc of ice frozen to the sky,
The streets are whipped clean of people: the wanderer blows into the nearest doorway …