Spring Night

The few minutes of a Spring night are worth ten thousand pieces of gold.

The perfume of the flowers is so pure.

The shadows of the moon are so black.

Su Dongpo, (1037-1101) from “Spring Night” in “One Hundred Poems from the Chinese.” Trans. Kenneth Rexroth.

 


Notes:

21 thoughts on “Spring Night

  1. I gaze at your photo and breathe into the beautiful, beguiling mystery of it all. And then, I look up and out of the window in front of where I sit at my desk. To my left, the moon hangs like a giant golden orb punched out of the morning sky and in front of me and all across the righthand sky, the sun is busy painting the clouds rose and pink and golden.
    And as I type, entranced by how quickly the sky is fading to pale blue – a bald eagle swoops past, from the moon side of my view, past where I sit, upriver towards the mountains to the west.
    Seriously.
    I couldn’t make that up! It just happened!
    What a beautiful dance of night becoming day you have offered up — I don’t know if I would have been watching had I not been looking from your moonshot to the moon still visible in the sky this morning!
    Thank you.!

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  2. Thank you for Rexroth’s translation of Su Dongpo. In this year of the pandemic, I find it quite wonderful to re-read poems about our same
    moon written by a man on the other side of the world so many hundreds of years ago.

    Liked by 1 person

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