Tumult, weeping, many new ghosts.
Heartbroken, aging, alone, I sing
To myself. Ragged mist settles
In the spreading dusk. Snow skurries
In the coiling wind. The wineglass
Is spilled. The bottle is empty.
The fire has gone out in the stove.
Everywhere men speak in whispers.
I brood on the uselessness of letters.
translated by Kenneth Rexroth
Being Present for the Moment
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Singer, Songwriter and Author from Kyoto, Japan.
Singer, Songwriter and Author from Kyoto, Japan.
An online activist from Bosnia and Herzegovina, based in Sarajevo, standing on the right side of the history - for free Palestine.
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Artist by choice, photographer by default, poet by accident.
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L'essenziale è invisibile e agli occhi e al cuore. Beccarlo è pura questione di culo
In Kate's World
Leonard Durso 
The uselessness of letters… it is crazy how the useless in one age can end up being useful for so many hundreds of years afterwards. But those letters almost never pay the rent, or any other dividends, in the moment they are written. So that can’t be why we write them.
Ah but think about how long it took for a letter once written to arrive at its destination and how old the news was by that time. And since he was away from family and home so often, how lonely and out of touch he must have felt.
So very true. But he wrote, and then his writing about the uselessness of letters has survived all this time. It’s likely in another age his actual letters home would have survived as well. Into the future, where the use is.
Even so, his poems are like letters into the future which I’m sure was a hope of his. Again, useful to us in the future. Speaking to us across 1300 years.
…and to me, directly! thanks to you posting it for Tu Fu.
I am really enjoying the Rexroth translations. Only have a small book of his translations (Songs of Love, Moon & Wind, published almost 20 years after he died) but need to seek out more of his work with our Tang dynasty friends.