from Drinking Wine: 1 by T’ao Ch’ien

Way’s been ruins a thousand years.
People all hoard their hearts away:

so busy scrambling after esteemed
position, they’d never touch wine.

But whatever makes living precious
occurs in this one life, and this life

never lasts. It’s startling, sudden as
lightning, a hundred years offering

all abundance. Take it! What more
could you hope to make of yourself?

translated by David Hinton

3 thoughts on “from Drinking Wine: 1 by T’ao Ch’ien

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 )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter 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.