poetry

the dawn is here…

In the summer night
The evening still seems present,
But the dawn is here.
To what region of the clouds
Has the wandering moon come home?

~Kiyohara no Fukayabu

Meditative photography with an iPad, John F Simon’s “Drawing your own Path,” a pair of reading glasses, a fountain pen, and the dawn.  Edited in Lightroom CC.

the quatrain of seven steps

abstract-1web

People burn the beanstalk to boil beans,
filtering them to extract juice.
The beanstalks were burnt under the cauldron,
and the beans in the cauldron wailed:
“We were originally grown from the same root;
Why should we hound each other to death with such impatience?

~Cao Zhi

I was introduced to the Quatrain of Seven Steps while watching, The Advisors Alliance, a 2017 Chinese two-part television series based on the life of Sima Yi, a government official and military general who lived in the late Eastern Han dynasty and Three Kingdoms period of China.

The poem itself is written in the traditional ”five-character quatrain” style and is an extended metaphor that describes the relationship of two brothers and the ill-conceived notion of one harming the other over petty squabbling.