When I was young
I had a strange notion
of old age
as if a butterfly
would pine
for caterpillar days
Age
2
Tag Archives: mortality
I think, by Dai Wangshu (1905-1950)
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
Time and all that
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.
We live, not moment to moment
We live, not moment to moment,
but in a single eternal moment,
soft and unyielding, like splinters
of destiny,
songs in the heart of the universe,
unheard, unhummed,
but by the small almost still
vibration of unseeable things,
now real, now gone,
now magnified to deathless
breathlessness, beyond, finally,
all knowing.
One day, we’ll fly there on
wings of dying, spread ourselves
across the native sky
like phantom snow.
Amuse mouche
A breath of reason, quiet
As a slumbering guard,
Easy as falling, effortless
As unknowing.
Then whimsy shifts the burden
And our wings become despair,
The high notion of pointlessness
When all visible light fails
And only the path remains,
Unlit and wholly
Vulgar as a bishop,
Only more like a cat in heat.
The ancient wisdoms fail to impress
Upon us the hasty times
In which we live,
With left baggage
From countless dead hours,
From times when it took
Only a second thought
To kill an idea,
When enslaved and enslavers alike
Believed the same corrupt verses,
When change was a thing
Of generations.
So ring cold the wind,
Bring down the ancient will to
Dance, among the chosen,
And sing, among the frozen.
The old cycles continue,
Now stronger, now weaker,
But always sure-footed, inevitable
Unto the unforeseeable.
The same skills — to kill,
To hunt, to take away without
Hesitation — still function
But how long?
Geology is gaining on us.
Our charts are uncertain,
Blank just where we need them,
Gaping lacunae for us to leap into.
exiles child 