…and then Sunday rolls around and I take the day off from technology. I read instead: this Sunday it was a new collection of Chinese science fiction from the library. While the 30/30 Facebook prompt (hunger lounge) was rolling around in my head and not getting any purchase, I read some lovely lines that just begged to be in a poem. So I obliged.
Beginner’s Mind
Every day, as the temple bell tolls five, I sweep
from the library to the stone steps to the temple gates
where the ancient pagoda tree grows, its gnarled
branches like the talons of a rampant beast.
The layered green branches of the cypress grove
separates us, like a firewall, from the noise
and dust of the secular world. Smog glistens
above the city like the piled layers of a sari.
I imagine passengers squeezed together
like canned sardines on the number 2 subway
train leaving the lamasery station. A bell tolls
on the hour, and startled birds take to the air.
Master Subhuti once struck Monkey three times
on the head with a ferule and then walked away
with hands held behind him. How am I to interpret
two strikes on the left shoulder and one on the right?
My journey through the dark woods is accompanied
only by the gentle susurration of pines.
(found poem from “Coming of the Light,” by Chen Quifan, pp. 387-413 in Broken Stars: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation, edited and translated by Ken Liu
crab apple blossoms
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