[Something I wrote in comments on the old blog a few years back. Found it, decided it deserved its own post. Here it is.]
I am only an old man, sitting here in sunlight
bright morning, springtime in these mountain heights.
The children followed me. “Nanpo Tszekhi, sing us a poem!”
I spread my arms wide, opened my eyes wide,
sang to them as the pea hen calls its mate.
They ran off laughing. I walked alone into the mountains.
What is this tree, its canopy so broad
the teams of a hundred chariots could shelter underneath?
When Heilongjiang’s winter storms descend,
each stallion would remain dry and warm beneath these branches.
Why have these mountains’ men not cut it down,
sawn stout limbs for temple timbers, planks for Huang Ho barges?
I looked: no branch ran so much as two chi straight.
There is enough wood here to fire ten thousand pots,
and then to boil water to fill all ten thousand pots,
and then to roast pork enough that each of the ten thousand pots
could steam a hundred bao! I sniffed the wood.
Its aroma, dung with ichor and ammonia, made my nostrils burn.
The smoke from such wood would empty out a town.
Still, I thought, the villagers could surely use the roots
to carve coffins for their dead,
or smallboxes to lacquer and keep rice.
No root was broader than my thumb. A basketwork of them
held the palatial tree fast to the mountain.
Cannot the leaves be used to season rice,
to wrap small fishes in for steaming?
The leaf I plucked made my tongue bleed with its rasps.
Massive enough to hold a town, this tree is worth little.
All men die, princes and monks and laborers.
The ten thousand things die. What was useful is consumed,
its ashes tossed on the dungheap, its beauty forgotten.
In uselessness this tree found immortality.
1 comment on "Useful"
love the new hair do