Two Cranes

Two Cranes
Originally uploaded by jhhymas

Yesterday's re-sort yielded two boxes of paper to recycle. We took it today. There is no recycling pickup here, but large bins are placed near the new Fire Hall. It also turned up a Poetry Flash from 2005 with WONDERFUL long articles on Kay Ryan (who is now the poet laureate), Robert Creeley, who was very influential and much loved (his readings enjoyed almost rock-star popularity during the Sixties) and Robinson Jeffers, that fierce and craggy Pacific Coast poet. Each article was solid, informative and interesting. NOw I am having trouble throwing away a newspaper that I should have tossed unread. . .

Nature cast in green, white and blue

Secret lagoon
Originally uploaded by jhhymas

Continuing with part 4 of

POETRY LESSONS by Gu Cheng

4.
Because of my deep needs, I often travel the far edges of society.

There in front of me are plants, clouds and the sea—nature cast in green, white and blue. The purity of these colors wipes away the dust of the everyday world, letting my mind recover its senses.

Is this something I am learning for the first time? No, it seems to be a recollection of an earlier time, as if before I was born I was one of them. I once was curved like the tusk
of a mammoth, once as innocent as a leaf, once as minute and happy as floating plankton, that free . . . .

I want to thank nature for letting me discover myself, discover the story of all things of the world, living and not. I want to thank it for giving me an endless supply of poems and songs.

This is why in the midst of the battle with reality, in the midst of the howl of the grinding machines, I can still say in a sweet quiet voice:

I’m yours.
----- Gu Cheng

I'll give you the last part tomorrow. Then I'll write about Gu Cheng a little and about this poem. Good nIght!

Dark Clouds over the Sea of Dreams

IMG_8962 squ
Originally uploaded by jhhymas

This is the first part of a five-part poem by Gu Cheng, Chinese poet, as translated by Joseph R. Allen. It is on pp. 179-180 of Sea of Dreams. [See previous post.] (I cannot make each part indented in this blog--I have indicated the indent by a soft return.)
I'll try to give the other parts of the poem in subsequent posts.

POETRY LESSONS (1980)

1.
It was a raindrop that first introduced me to poetry.

On the way to my primary school there was a spire-like pine tree, but whenever I passed by it never spoke.

Then one day, after a rain shower, when the world was fresh and clean, that pine tree suddenly was all aglitter, with crystalline raindrops hanging from every needle; at that moment I completely lost touch with my own being. Inside each single drop I saw a raindrop floating; each drop was full of the clear blue sky; each drop held a new world for me . . . .

I knew then that a single small drop of rain was able to contain everything, and to distill everything within it. The world that sparkled within the raindrop was purer and more beautiful than the world within which we live our lives.

Thus, a poem is just that: a raindrop glittering on some tree of the imagination.

------Gu Cheng