The clock will go slow If you watch it, you know; You must work right along and forget it. So study your best Till it's time for a rest, The clock will go fast, if you let it!
The lake is glassy in August. The air and sky are oh-so clear. Vapor steams off of Yunmeng ponds, Ripples lap at Yueyang's piers. There're no boats to cross the water. Shame! I couldn't emulate sages. I sit and watch a fisherman And envy his catch and his wages.
This is poem #124 in 300 Tang Poems [唐诗三百首.] Original Poem in Simplified Chinese:
Poetry is poignant and ornate; Essays are deep and content-centric. Stele entries are true to the essence; Paeans, moving and melancholic. Inscriptions are concise and kindly; Telltales have a logic and cadence. Odes show great grace and refinement; Op-eds are unrepressed and intense. Music 's penetrating and stately; Speeches must sparkle with cleverness. Though there ever so many forms, All thwart evil and allow release: Expression, sans pride overweening, With no waste of words or lost meaning.
Drunk at night in Dongpo. I sober, then drink once more; I return at three A.M. To hear boy's thunderous snores. I knock but there's no answer -- Lean on my staff and listen To water, and feel my regrets As ripples in river glisten. I could vanish in this boat, And see out my life afloat.
Note: The Song Dynasty poet Su Shi [苏轼] was also known as Dongpo [東坡] or Zizhan [子瞻.]
A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.
There is a singer everyone has heard, Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird, Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again. He says that leaves are old and that for flowers Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten. He says the early petal-fall is past When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers On sunny days a moment overcast; And comes that other fall we name the fall. He says the highway dust is over all. The bird would cease and be as other birds But that he knows in singing not to sing. The question that he frames in all but words Is what to make of a diminished thing.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun; And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. The work of hunters is another thing: I have come after them and made repair Where they have left not one stone on a stone, But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean, No one has seen them made or heard them made, But at spring mending-time we find them there. I let my neighbor know beyond the hill; And on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go. To each the boulders that have fallen to each. And some are loaves and some so nearly balls We have to use a spell to make them balance: 'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!' We wear our fingers rough with handling them. Oh, just another kind of out-door game, One on a side. It comes to little more: There where it is we do not need the wall: He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors.' Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder If I could put a notion in his head: 'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him, But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather He said it for himself. I see him there Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. He moves in darkness as it seems to me, Not of woods only and the shade of trees. He will not go behind his father's saying, And he likes having thought of it so well He says again, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'
Smoke slowly rises from sodden woods; Millet 's steamed to feed the fieldhands; Egrets fly over foggy paddies; Hidden birds sing from lush tree stand. Mountain hikers study hibiscus, Under dewy pines chew sunflower seeds, Give mat space to any old traveler. Gull and I: wary of each other's deeds.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 