I’m starting something new — Friday haiku. I hope you respond in the comments with haiku as well. No judgment, just fun.
Red-tail hawk,
lord of earth and sky —
who invited these crows?
Friday haiku
3
Tag Archives: nature
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
Music
We spend our lives
trying to mute the noise
unaware that it’s
the very music of the cosmos
we’re so desperate to hear
The hammer of your eyes
The hammer of your eyes
Shapes everything you see
Until reality collapses
From the weight of persistence
The thingness of things is such
That it mutates to meet expectation,
Owes allegiance to the naming ritual
Rolls from the tongue with lilting guile
And slips from the grasp as easily
As money or grace
These things carry meaning:
Sky, sea, mountain and plain
Whose rivers tie the bounds
Of Earth together
These things rip meaning from the heart:
Ash, coal, and smoke,
Zippered into a theory of sky
Beyond the bezelled horizon.
We ignore destiny,
Hoping to write our own stories,
Like Oedipus, like God,
Unaware that fate has no will
But is bound by the sacred law
Of irony.
Fall falling
The autumn sun sweeps
clean the street, forlorn no more.
Even the litter-born history,
so recently past, cannot withstand it.
We think we’re the true organisms,
that to us belong the spoils
of living, and yet,
such marionettes of weather,
our strings showing
in spite of all our efforts,
the sky like water,
our hearts like wind.
exiles child 