Summer Pond
From the red lotus,
raindrops spill one by one,
gathering on green lotus leaves to become white beads.
Making tens of thousands of beads and pouring them into the pond,
the small pond of the country house
grows busy whenever the monsoon comes.
A Beautiful Book
One year, I read a beautiful book
not in a library, but on the street;
not at a desk,
but in restaurants, on mountain trails, in movie theaters, karaoke rooms, teahouses.
A person like a magazine,
a person like a novel,
a person like a book of poems
I turned each page slowly, savoring it.
It was a book with a beautiful cover and an equally beautiful text.
Pages warm with body heat,
I read them with my eyes,
turned them with my tongue,
and underlined them with my two feet.
Books do not exist only in bookstores or libraries.
The greatest reading is not always
scripture or the classics.
A person—
truly, one beautiful book.
Like a Puppy and a Cat
Like a puppy at play with a grasshopper
leaping from the woodland beside a country courtyard,
like a cat amusing itself with a cicada
that has flown through the window on a summer day,
fate plays with my heart,
without ever considering how much it hurts.
