Lush grass covers the plains.
One year it withers; the next, it thrives.
Wildfires burn, but not to eradication.
With Spring winds, it's rejuvenated.
Its aroma floats in to subdue derelict paths.
Vivid green overtakes the ghost town.
I say farewell to departing friends
as intense feeling swells within.
In Chinese [Simplified]:
离离原上草 一岁一枯荣
野火烧不尽 春风吹又生
远芳侵古道 晴翠接荒城
又送王孙去 萋萋满别情
white pillars, once trees,
stand above the water:
record of what was.
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose busom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
a cormorant weaves
into and over water:
no trace but ripples.
From the hilltop,
one can watch nature reclaim:
green grows up the glass,
tufts sprout from each crevice
and the man-made world is crevice-laden,
one seed blown into a mortar crack
will become a wedge --
a sprout that splits stone.
Concrete and steel prove
digestible:
time, water, oxygen,
the enzymatic requirements are few.
Fungi blooms from a pile-full of dung.
I don't know whether it's a desirable meal,
whether our trappings & vestiges are
haute cuisine,
or merely a meal
of convenience.
This place was once with us.
Now, it's hidden so well
that it's become a myth,
a once firm and tangible thing --
now invisible & conceptual.
Nature swallowed our world
and farted our mythos.
O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting
fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked
thee
, has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy
beauty how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and
buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true
to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover
thou answerest
them only with
spring)
ripples march
across the glassy river --
faced by a reed phalanx.
Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
Be fair or foul, or rain or shine
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
Not Heaven itself, upon the past has power,
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.
the flowers hide
in tall grass & sedges,
but bees still find them.
I don't remember my dreams --
not in the middle of the night
and not in the morning.
But, sometimes, I catch a glimpse
at a random instant:
composing a poem,
reflecting on a passage
from a book,
eating a cracker...
But my dreams are like
frightened animals,
turning my attention
directly upon them,
makes them skitter off...,
vanishing into the thicket.
My dreams vanish like they
were never really there,
and I am left wondering
just what I saw.
The harder I try to remember,
the more severely I scrub
my mental hard drive,
purging all shapes and motions,
until my recollection is nothing
but a vague residue of feeling.
I don't KNOW that it was a dream.
I couldn't swear to it.
All I know is that it's an image
that I can't tie to my waking life,
can't tie to any person, place,
or thing I know to be real.
(And, often enough, it's an image
that couldn't exist in the real world.)
I couldn't remember it as a dream,
but - somehow - I intensely FEEL
that it was a dream,
but the Dream is deep down in its hole,
shaking like a critter that
was almost snatched up by
a monster too awful to
contemplate....
and, somehow, I am that monster.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 