White Dress by Yuan Chen

Light rain settles this white dust,
and her perfume penetrates thin walls.

Her jade-white body slips into a jade-white gown.
The embroidery is beautiful, but sad.

She blossoms like a pear against an ivory couch.
A silk blouse and green skirt

hang in the smoky incense of aloe.
Why do I waste time painting early morning clouds?

translated by Sam Hamill

7 thoughts on “White Dress by Yuan Chen

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.