July Poetry, Day 13 – Li Po

Today my favorite Chinese poet, Li Po.  Considering how long ago he wrote I consider him the Pablo Neruda of China, enjoy ~ ZD Blue

Photo by Rich Krissel

Amidst the flowers a jug of wine

By Li Po

Amidst the flowers a jug of wine,
I pour alone lacking companionship.
So raising the cup I invite the Moon,
Then turn to my shadow which makes three of us.
Because the Moon does not know how to drink,
My shadow merely follows the movement of my body.
The moon has brought the shadow to keep me company a while,
The practice of mirth should keep pace with spring.
I start a song and the moon begins to reel,
I rise and dance and the shadow moves grotesquely.
While I’m still conscious let’s rejoice with one another,
After I’m drunk let each one go his way.
Let us bind ourselves for ever for passionless journeyings.
Let us swear to meet again far in the Milky Way.

Do you care more about cheap goods from China or the lives of monks?

Do you care more about cheap goods from China or the lives of monks?

I very often am given a hard time by people who come into my office to tell me about some tragedy in the world and expect me to react more than I do.  The conclusion they typically draw from this is that I’m not an empathetic person, they’re wrong.  The fact is I grew up in a poor town, I’ve lived in Appalachia, I’ve traveled in the Mississippi Delta, in Brazil, China, Tibet and Nepal.  I’ve seen some of the earth shattering poverty that exists in this world.  I understand how many people die each day in our world, even how many children, from ridiculously curable diseases, from lack of food and clean water or medications that would cost pennies.  The number of people who die daily from dysentery, basically people dying from severe diarrhea is horrifying.  So the fact is the disaster of the day that makes it into the news headlines is only the tip of the iceberg and were I to allow myself to openly grieve for what I know happens every single day, I’d be a useless basket case. 

Occasionally though there is something that breaks through the wall I have to keep those emotions behind, particularly when it is generally ignored by the rest of reality.  While we are daily subjected to 20 plus hours a day of Newt Gingrich being a whiny bitch because Romney is beating him, or who Sarah Palin might endorse for president, we ignore much more serious matters.

Would it surprise you to hear that today, a third Tibetan Buddhist monk has burned himself alive in the last three days!  He’s the fifteenth monk to do that over the last year, how much news coverage of this have you seen?  These monks are undertaking this sacrifice in protest of the ongoing occupation of Tibet and the suppression of their religion.  I have traveled in China and Tibet, I know many Chinese, they are not bad people but the country buys into the government propaganda concerning China’s “rights” to Tibet.  I have seen with my own eyes the ruins of temples, hospitals and schools that were destroyed when China “liberated” Tibet in the 1949 invasion and cultural revolution.  The Chinese have even tried to co-opt the Tibetan Buddhist religion by abducting the duly selected Panchen Lama and replacing him with a fraud, as well as the well-known exile of the Dalai Lama.  I cringed with disgust when I toured the holiest sites in Lhasa, Tibet and saw little communist minders in their suits telling the monks what to do.

I wonder if the American media or Americans themselves would so easily ignore this being done to Christians in a Christian country, the hypocrisy in our society at times sickens me.  One immolation in Tunisia set off the entire Arab Spring, we care about that, the Middle East is the area that makes it possible for us to buy cheap gas, unfortunately for Tibetans they can’t offer us the same and so we can’t afford to care apparently.  Cheap gas and cheap Chinese products mean more to Americans than the occupation and oppression of a peaceful people and their religion.  Shame on us, shame on all of us.

 

June Poetry: Day 4 Li Po

I no longer remember how I first heard of Li Po but I love the simplicity of his work, the playfulness of his drinking poems and the fact that his work reflect the Taoist philosophy I follow.  Below is a little about this poet who lived 1300 years ago.

Li Po (about 701-762 CE)  was a native of Sezchaun, China. While still in his teens, he retired to mountains in the north of the province to live with a religious recluse by the name of Tunyen-tzu. The two of them were said to keep strange birds as pets. Li Po later traveled down the Yangtze to Yun-meng, a town north of the river and Tung-ting Lake, where he married.

From then on his occupation became that of a wandering poet. Throughout his life he produced an abundance of poems on many different subjects—particularly nature, wine, friendship, solitude, and the passage of time. He has since become recognized by many as the greatest of a highly talented array of Tang poets. He stayed for a few years in various places, traveled extensively, and became for a time one of the Six Idlers of the Bamboo Valley, who celebrated wine and song in the mountains of Chu-lai. All this did not provide a satisfactory existence for his first wife, who left him with their two children. He appears to have married three times.

A Mountain Revelry

To wash and rinse our souls of their age-old sorrows,
We drained a hundred jugs of wine.
A splendid night it was . . . .
In the clear moonlight we were loath to go to bed,
But at last drunkenness overtook us;
And we laid ourselves down on the empty mountain,
The earth for pillow, and the great heaven for coverlet

Chuang Tzu And The Butterfly

Chuang Tzu in dream became a butterfly,
And the butterfly became Chuang Tzu at waking.
Which was the real—the butterfly or the man ?
Who can tell the end of the endless changes of things?
The water that flows into the depth of the distant sea
Returns anon to the shallows of a transparent stream.
The man, raising melons outside the green gate of the city,
Was once the Prince of the East Hill.
So must rank and riches vanish.
You know it, still you toil and toil,—what for?

Drinking Alone in the Moonlight

Amongst the flowers I
am alone with my pot of wine
drinking by myself; then lifting
my cup I asked the moon
to drink with me, its reflection
and mine in the wine cup, just
the three of us; then I sigh
for the moon cannot drink,
and my shadow goes emptily along
with me never saying a word;
with no other friends here, I can
but use these two for company;

in the time of happiness, I
too must be happy with all
around me; I sit and sing
and it is as if the moon
accompanies me; then if I
dance, it is my shadow that
dances along with me; while
still not drunk, I am glad
to make the moon and my shadow
into friends, but then when
I have drunk too much, we
all part; yet these are
friends I can always count on
these who have no emotion
whatsoever; I hope that one day
we three will meet again,
deep in the Milky Way.