Tangled Hair/A Lotus Barge
A Lotus Barge
O sir priests, rowing back
In your barge in the evening late!
Pray, of which lotus flowers have you more,
The red or the white?
A barge shoots down the stream!
The shrine on whose wall the night before
I scribbled a poem by the light of the moon,
Swiftly disappears.
In essay I touched with my young lips
The dewdrops on the lotus flowers.
How cool they were!
As to good and evil,
Ask those behind me on the bank.
I, for one, ride and play
On a hurricane.
Picking up the Holy Scriptures
Which I had cast into the depths,
Again I look up to the sky and wail.
I am a bewildered child.
If today be full
And today be abundant,
I am glad to die today.
Tomorrow and yesterday
Are names I know not.
I talk not of the way,
Think not of the future,
And ask nothing of fame.
Here we meet face to face,
My love and I.
For your sake and for mine own,
And for days of youth together we spent,
I let fall hot tears of gladness
And cold tears of sadness.
How pleasing is
The crumbling sound of the castle
Which my foolish heart had built!
Let me fade
As the spring day fades,
Or fall like the peacock’s feathers
Of green and gold.
Swifter than a hail-storm,
Lighter than a feather,
A gentle melancholy
Passes over my soul.