I’ve been reading the Big Red Book of Twentieth Century Chines Literature. Wonderfully eye-opening, with poets and novelists who are famous in China, but whom we’ve never heard of here, and really rather minimal-to-no political pandering. This is one of my favorites.
I think therefore I am a butterfly…
The soft call of a flower ten thousand years later
Has passed through the dreamless unwaking mist
To make my multicolored wings vibrate
Translated by Gregory Lee
If one thing is as good as the next,
if, returning to the nest, the hawk finds
nothing changed though some infinitesimal
bit of mouse has become fledgling,
if time is measured mostly in breaths
until even they fade to nothing,
replaced by sunrise and sunset,
if all this is true, there’s room for
some small satisfaction at the movement
of air from the passing blade of the reaper,
having missed once more.
Maybe there’s nothing more than this
to immortality — the thin, movable wedge
between life and death.
“I see portents, omens.
Nothing is as it seems,
everything requires
constant re-interpretation.”
Does it seems like that, then,
to your eyes?
I see the diamonds in your sky
glisten and fall,
neglected.
exiles child 