POETRY

PRUNING TREES – Po Chu-I “Before my window grow trees; tall trees and dense foliage grows. Sad, alas, the distant view of the mountains: obscured, between them, can be seen just One morning I took a knife and hatchet; with my own hands cut the flourishing branches. Myriads of leaves fall around me in the head, thousands of mountains appear …

HOW COULD I: “How could I hold it in me, my soul, that your material does not touch; as you remove it over, ad infinitum? I could hide it in a remote corner in the darkness; a stranger quiet refuge, which is not followed to vibrate if it vibrates your deep. But everything that touches us, you and me, together, …

NIGHT THOUGHTS – Li Bai In front of my bed the moon illuminates the earth As reflections of frost. I look up to the shining moon, then bowed his head: my land is far away.   MOORING AT NIGHT BRIDGE MAPLE – Zhang Ji The moon sets, ice crystals fill the sky, cry of a crow. In the river a …

“Love or blood? Throughout the spring peony is in this that haunts me. Night falls, I’m alone, alone without a poem.” Her name is Akiko and was born in a winter day in 1878, giving us by her death – in the spring of 1942 – the indelible charm of its tanka poems, where the five lines formed syllables (5, …

“I get lost if I encounter, I doubt if I find, I do not have if I got it. As if I walk, I sleep, but I’m awake. As if asleep, I wake up, and I do not belong. At the end of life is in itself a great insomnia and there’s a shiny rude awakening in everything we think …

Song of autumn at midnight (Anonymous) “The autumn wind coming through windows The silk curtains come agitated by the breath moves. I raise my head and look at the moon that shines, And I feel joy for the rays that come from thousands of them.”   What’s in the mountains? (Tao Hongjing) “What’s in the mountains? Over the mountains there …

Thoughts on a quiet night “Before the bed a bright moonbeam on earth seems to be frost shine. He raises his head looking at the bright moon, he bends his head thinking about the native country.” He speaks of daily life in a poetic way, and sometimes with many words. Whatever the emotion of the moment, a monastery or the …

“To the east and west walls of Luoyang In the long salute the passing of time. Before she left the snow that looked like flowers, Now are the flowers that look like snow. “ (Fan Yun)     Four lines of five syllables each, but each of those syllables is a Chinese character, that is a word. Special rules, in …

“Dead crying … In the great days of the tomb, As I stand in birch Izach and in mourning, Which one wears me about life, after you! Bones on the widely whiten, Ghosts of August have carried Wichrowa zaweieja, Wounded eagle upon me croak, Dead crying. Crying past and the people and things, Cry pennants with the siege of Vienna, …

………………………….. “What we know, in general, of Japan? What we did know hand-fans and screens. The country of the rising Sun is the one of the decorations that come from there. In the bottom of the picture stands the white cone of the sacred Fujiyama, at whose feet the trees crowding the small woods of pines and cherry, green and …