Short Poems

Athwart the surface of the stream
There lieth stretched the cuckoo's voice.

When told that it will snakes devour,
How frightful is the pheasant's voice!

Here! is this you on the top of Fan-ko Mountain,
Wearing a huge hat in the noon-day sun?
How thin, how wretchedly thin, you have grown!
You must have been suffering from poetry again.

Boundless grasses over the plain
Come and go with every season;
Wildfire never quite consumes them—
They are tall once more in the spring wind.
Sweet they press on the old high-road
And reach the crumbling city-gate. . . .
O Prince of Friends, you are gone again. . . .
I hear them sighing after you.

How gladly I would seek a mountain
If I had enough means to live as a recluse!
For I turn at last from serving the State
To the Eastern Woods Temple and to you, my master.
… Like ashes of gold in a cinnamon-flame,
My youthful desires have been burnt with the years—
And tonight in the chilling sunset-wind
A cicada, singing, weighs on my heart.

If to this frame of mine in spring's first hour,
When o'er the moor the lightsome mists do curl,
Might but be lent the shape of some fair flower,
Haply thou'dst deign to pluck me, cruel girl!

One thing, alas! more fleeting have I seen
Than wither'd leaves driv'n by the autumn gust:
Yea, evanescent as the whirling dust
Is man's brief passage o'er this mortal scene!

A thousand years of happy life be thine!
Live on, my lord, till what are pebbles now,
By age united, to great rocks shall grow,
Whose venerable sides the moss doth line!

When the moon has coloured half the house,
With the North Star at its height and the South Star setting,
I can feel the first motions of the warm air of spring
In the singing of an insect at my green-silk window.

Death had no terrors, Life no joys,
Before I met with thee;
But now I fear, however long
My life may chance to be,
'Twill be too short for me!