Poetry

Ablaze

Spring tidesOn winter’s beachesGreen shoalsFlow-ering currentsFor beachcombers

Pink on GreenFlecked petal dot,Sidewalk stripSpring colors wakingSpringtime dreams.

(with all my love for anyone of any faith or not of faith, I celebrate all).

Chang Shih (1133–1180) was born in Mienchu in Szechuan province and later moved to Hengyang in Hunan. The son of the famous general and prime minister, Chang Chun, he served in the Southern Sung capital of Hangchou and eventually reached the post of senior compiler of the dynastic history. He was also known for his essays advocating Confucian values. Chang, Chu Hsi, and Lu Tsu-ch’ien were ranked as the three illuminati of their age. The Arrival of Spring (Lichun) is a solar period that begins shortly after the lunar New Year, usually in the first week of February. The division of the year into phases of light and dark, or yin and yang, goes back to the Yellow Emperor. In the ancient system of trigrams devised by Fu Hsi around 2800 B.C. and reworked by King Wen around 1100 B.C., east is the direction of spring and west is the direction of autumn. In the different but complementary systems of these two men, east is also seen as the direction of either fire or thunder, while west is the location of water or lakes.

Translation by Wyatt Mason.

Treasures

I don't consider myself much of a poet. I'm more of a prose writer. I had to write one for a class, and I was inspired by the works of Imiri Baraka, Adrienne Rich, and Juliana Spahr, I wrote about a protest I had been at.

Mascha Kaléko was born in 1907 as the daughter of a Russian father and an Austrian mother. The family fled from the persecution of Jews in Galicia to Germany in 1918. Mascha spend her teenage years in Berlin. In 1928 she marries the philologist Saul Kaléko. In 1934 she meets and falls in love with the Jewish composer Chemjo Vinaver and starts a four year long affair until her divorce from Saul in 1938.

This is my favourite poem by Dutch poet Hans Andreus. Here's the English translation: