dots-menu
×

Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Witter Bynner and Kiang Kung-hu, trans.

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

In My Lodge at Wang-Ch’uan after a Long Rain

Witter Bynner and Kiang Kung-hu, trans.

From “Poems by Wang Wei”
From the Chinese

THE WOODS have stored the rain, and slow comes the smoke

As rice is cooked on faggots and carried to the fields;

Over the quiet marshland flies a white egret,

And mango-birds are singing in the full summer trees.

I have learned to watch in peace the mountain morning-glories,

To eat split dewy sunflower-seeds under a bough of pine,

To yield the place of honor to any boor at all….

Why should I frighten sea-gulls even with a thought?