DAILY PHOTO: Myeongdong Cathedral
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Wen Fu 11 “Banal & Sublime” [文赋十一] by Lu Ji [陆机] [w/ Audio]
Some shoots and stalks stand out --
Taller than the masses.
Their form eludes pursuit,
Sound slips through, like gases.
Great lines are always disjunct:
Don't weave with mid'ling lyrics.
They're pent up and peerless:
Chop them? A win that's pyrrhic.
Jade flecks make mountains shimmer,
Pearly waters enchant.
The thicket mustn't be clipped
If Kingfisher's glory, grant.
Stitched words end under snow,
Work the weft, steady and slow.
The original in Simplified Chinese is:
或苕发颖竖，离众绝致。
形不可逐，响难为系。
块孤立而特峙，非常音之所纬。
心牢落而无偶，意徘徊而不能揥。
石韫玉而山辉，水怀珠而川媚。
彼榛楛之勿翦，亦蒙荣于集翠。
缀下里于白雪，吾亦济夫所伟。
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DAILY PHOTO: Double-Decker Trams of Hong Kong
Goblin [Free Verse]
After dark —-
A city park —-
There runs the thing
That comes to life
By night.
Caged in stillness
Through sunlit hours.
Its night persona
Is blurred movement
Seen only from the
Corner of an eye.
It stays near deep shadow,
Beyond the lamp lit arcs.
Where is it?
No one knows,
But if one were to
Check the cathedral
Spire, you’d find
Only an impenetrable
Void…
until sunup.
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Bed of Boulders [Haiku]
mid-summer:
a stream trickles through boulders
once dragged by floods.
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DAILY PHOTO: Seoul by Night
“In Search of the Taoist, Chang” [寻南溪常道士] by Liu Changqing 刘长卿
I walk the narrow path,
Clogs divoting the moss.
White clouds over the shore;
Gate obscured by Spring grass.
Post-rain, I see the pines,
Follow stream to its source.
Flower-mind, then Zen Mind --
Arrived! Words have no force.
This is poem #136 of the 300 Tang Poems [唐诗三百首.] The original in Simplified Chinese goes:
一路经行处， 莓苔见屐痕。
白云依静渚， 春草闭闲门。
过雨看松色， 随山到水源。
溪花与禅意， 相对亦忘言。
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PROMPT: Bothers
I once got a masala cookie beside my coffee at a cafe that took itself way too seriously. What’s a masala cookie, you might ask? It’s treachery, I say. It sits on a plate pretending to be a delightful sugar cookie, but without sugar or sweetness of any kind — just salt and a spice mixture. It was supposed to bring out the notes of cherry, chocolate, and… Blah, Blah, Blah. You know what would bring out the notes of chocolate in the coffee, some fucking chocolate in the cookie — that’s what. You can’t just impersonate a cookie and expect anyone to tolerate that level of betrayal. I certainly don’t want to live in such a world. That’s it, the only offense of recent years that I haven’t gotten over. A few years after it happened, I walked by that place and saw that the cafe had gone out of business, replaced by a Hello Kitty phone-case store. Good! I hope the owner and staff have moved on, putting their liberal arts graduate degrees to good use, teaching at community colleges as they should, rather than terrorizing the public with pseudo-cookies to make their overpriced coffee seem more of a bargain. I’ll end my rant here to go sit with my trauma.
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Bell Pavilion [Haiku]
Summer night:
bell pavilion - silent,
but for cricket chirp.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 