A Weekend Diary

…words and images from England's green and pleasant land…

Archive for the category “poetry”

06 Sep 2013

Сорок четыре года спустя

Ganges Love

Fleeting the moment: enduring the thought,
All love is illusion, yet I find myself caught,
Like a fly in a trap,
Whence there’s no hieing back
To a sky where the blue reeks of sorrow.

O! summer deceiver, you sprang your trap well;
All highways to heaven hide a trapdoor to hell,
Yet I can never forget
How that summer we met
On a shore on the far side of longing.

The flooding of senses made no sense at all;
Ah, would that I could be, held fast in your thrall,
Yet I dare not ask why
When never bluer the sky,
Love struck like the summerstruck Ganges.

© 2013 yizhivika

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17 Mar 2013
1 Comment

Awaiting Gu Taiqing…

Gu Taiqing

Gu Taiqing

Composed at Random

Human life is an endless struggle—
The post-horse and plow-ox.
On the brows of the Daoist sadness never grows:
Quietly holding a book of immortality, seated by the window,
What else is there to seek?

Prospects disappear, far, far away,
Months and years are hard to detain.
In a hundred years’ time everyone will be a pat of mud,
So arrange a firm and safe place in your own mind
And let the boat float with the stream.

Gu Taiqing (1799-1877)

From ‘Poems Written in Tianyou Pavilion’.

I’ve loved this poem since the very first day I read it, and have been intrigued by its author ever since. No surprise then that I ordered the following book from Amazon UK when I very recently became aware of it, as it includes biographical information about Gu Taiqing ;).

‘Biographical Dictionary Of Chinese Women: The Qing Period, 1644-1911’
Edited by Lily Xiao Hong Lee, A. D. Stefanowska and. Clara Wing-chung, 1998

[The image above is from Wikimedia]

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