LANGUAGES – Poetry by Bei Dao

LANGUAGES

Many languages are spoken, now, in this world. Soaring words, meet, meet, collide, they create sparks, sometimes hate, sometimes love. Higher the rise of rationality, but without sinking voice, with thoughts fragile and lightweight, bamboo tablets. A woven basket filled with blind poisonous mushrooms, those beasts painted on the rock we trample flowers galoppandoci above, but a head secret develops somewhere on earth. The wind carries with it the seeds of order, in the many languages that at this time, lives, flying over the world. But the production of language, so insubstantial, can not in any way increase or ease the pain taciturn men.

(Bei Dao)

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