Autumn Kessei 2017 Week 6

by tendo zenji

Autumn night, setting moon

Poised low in emptiness, a radiant moon
glistens incandescent in a drop of dew.

Trying to settle in, magpies startle away.
Fireflies float through open blinds, cold

shadow sparse in courtyard scholar-trees.
Fulling-stick rhythms tighten next door.

How will we ever meet in a land so vast?
Lingering out emptiness, I gaze and gaze.

-Meng Hao-jan (689-740)
translated by David Hinton in The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-jan