Li Po

The Solitude of Night
By Li Po
Translated by Shigeyoshi Obata

It was at a wine party-
I lay in a drowse, knowing it not.
The blown flowers fell and filled by lap.
When I arose, still drunken,
The birds had all gone to their nests,
And there remained but few of my comrades.
I went along the river - alone in the moonlight


I think we have all been at wine parties such as the one outlined above. It starts off with all of us toasting each other, laughing and feeling grand about the world and the fact that we are together. Then when the alcohol seeps into our bloodstream and dulls our senses enough we all fall into a slumber except for one or two and we wake in the midst of people but very much alone. The alcohol is still in the system but no one else is awake. The birds are silent. The singing that would go on forever has stopped. The usual condition of all of us is to be alone.

Night time is a hard time for many of us because that is when it becomes apparent that we as human beings exists as individuals, not in groups. We are born alone and we die alone. We can drink alcohol, take drugs and do all sorts of things to remove that knowledge from the mind and heart but it is only temporary. The oneness returns as it always does. There is a choice. You can relish the solitude as many learn to do or you can run away to another wine party.

Kobayashi Issa

(all the time I pray to Buddha)
By Kobayashi Issa
Translated by Robert Hass

All the time I pray to Buddha
I keep on
Killing mosquitoes.

I don't understand this poem fully but I can understand the irony that it seems to have. Buddhists as a rule do not pray. They meditate which is very different from praying. I would have liked to have seen other translations of this poem. It should read:

All the time I meditate (on the Buddha?)
I keep on
Killing mosquitoes.

Maybe Issa meant to use 'pray'. Buddha never thought of himself as a god and said many times that he was not a god but awake. Killing or destroying life is something that Buddhists try not to do, but I will kill a mosquito if it is in my room although I normally don't as they don't bother me very much. This sounds odd which is OK since my name is not on this blog, but there was this fly that was in my room for about a week. I tried not to kill it and it did bother me. Finally, it just disappeared. I missed it a little and never did find its "body". I was sick with the flu and it was my only visitor. It reminded me of the moth that was in the cockpit of Charles Lindbergh when he crossed the Atlantic Ocean.

Issa maybe telling us that we can be zen-like and meditate in our lotus position but mosquitoes still bother us and we all reach up and slap them when they bite. There are stories of masters who would meditate and nothing would disturb them. Gandhi was in deep meditation while on a train that was derailed and he never woke up until people shook him awake. This was an accident that killed many people. Most of us, however, are not holy men or women with deep powers of concentration and we tend to notice the discomforts of life.

Issa was a Japanese poet also known as Kobayashi Yataro and Kobayashi and took the pen name of Issa which means roughly a "cup of tea". He lived from 1763 to 1828.

D.H. Lawrence

PEOPLE
By D. H. Lawrence

The great gold apples of night
Hang from the street's long bough
Dripping their light
On the faces that drift and blow
Down the night-time, out of sight
In the wind's sad sough.

The ripeness of these apples of night
Distilling over me
Makes sickening the white
Ghost-flux by faces that hie
Them endlessly, endlessly by
Without meaning or reason why
They ever should be.

I have recorded this poem before on one my blogs, but I felt like it this evening as I came home from a evening function. I looked at the street lights in Daejeon, Korea and the people walking beneath the city lights and the glow from all of the shops and I was reminded of this poem first without realizing it and then when I found it again I knew. Of course, D. H. Lawrence and his gold apples of the night.

It is Sunday evening and it reminded me of the nights of my youth when I walked down street lanes in Chula Vista and watched the sun sink over the Pacific Ocean and the street lights would suddenly come on. I was not yet 13 years old. This was before I had read Lawrence and even before I knew he had existed. I can remember those lights as I walked and the glow from the television sets through the windows of suburban houses lying head to toe and the sounds of canned laughter of the "I love Lucy " and "Jackie Gleason" shows. I was alone as I walked. My father was drinking and on a rampage. It was best to walk in the evening. I was also feeling guilt for leaving my mother at the mercy of my father's anger.

I am also reminded of some Edward Hopper paintings and the lonely people sitting in cafes having cups of coffee, those nameless faces that I saw in my mind's eye in Chula Vista and the actual nameless faces I did see this evening except in Korea no one is alone like they are in the US. Where are all of the lonely people here? In their rooms? Sitting in places filled with family?No one is allowed to be alone. I knew a lady who was mentally ill here and she was always surrounded by her family although she was confused most of the time. She was swept up and carried along because in Korea everyone exists as a unit of people. Even if a family was too busy for their children, there are plenty of other family members who would take them in. No one would be walking the streets like I did growing up because the father was also the tyrant of the family or at least that is the theory.

I walked underneath those metal trees with their fruit of glass shinning in the night as the stars appeared. I watched the sun vanish and the moon glide across the sky. When you are alone, you learn to depend on yourself as your best friend and loneliness is not something to fear but to be cherished. Not a bad thing in itself. Lawrence understood this too.

William Carlos Williams

Blizzard
By WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

Snow:
years of anger following
hours that float idly down -
the blizzard
drifts its weight
deeper and deeper for three days
or sixty years, eh? Then
the sun! a clutter of
yellow and blue flakes -
Hairy looking trees stand out
in long alleys
over a wild solitude.
The man turns and there -
his solitary track stretched out
upon the world.

I have always felt that Williams is most zen of all of the poets. His poem, "The Red Wheelbarrow" is my favorite poem. In this poem, the poet shows the uselessness of anger. It really reflects what I have been feeling of late. I have been living my life feeling so much anger at people, events, situations that have occurred in my life. Although I am not at the end of my life as the person in this poem, the man in the poem finds that with all of his anger it has served nothing and that it served to keep him alone. I have found this to be so true.

I would think the poet's experiences as a working doctor really helped him see the futility of anger.( The above picture is one of my favorite of him on his house calls with one of his sons.) I really think he cared a great deal about his patients and about life and poetry. He worked at writing poems in between seeing patients and often used prescription pads to write his poems. He also wrote novels, short stories, critical essays and much more.

Carl Sandburg

Choose
By CARL SANDBURG

The single fist and ready,
Or the open hand held out waiting.
Choose:
For we meet by one or the other.

I am an American so November means a month of in which Thanksgiving Day appears, but I am not always full of gratitude. Sometimes I am angry. The last election in the United States shows that I am not the only person angry at the way things are right now. I suspect there will be many angry people carving the Thanksgiving Day turkey if they are lucky enough to have one.

The other day I was looking at some old journals that I kept when I worked at the welfare office in a Midwestern city years ago. I thought it was cute that I put a sign up on my desk that read, "It's hard to soar like an eagle when you are surrounded by turkeys." Good heavens, what a hostile thing to put on my desk. There was a lot of hostility on that job site and I certainly did not improve matters.

My fist has been closed for most of my life and I have been in denial of it. I choose that way and wondered why people reacted to me in anger. Golly gee. As Mark Twain said: "Denial is not a river in Egypt." I was in denial for most of my life. People have been shrinking back from me and my anger for some time and I have been getting more angrier as they did. I reasoned they had no reason to. Yeah,right.

I have been going to church of late. I am not a Christian but they speak English and I am in a country that I have few people I can talk to. There is no danger that I will convert, but I have been listening to the message of the Bible. One of them is that God is love and that if you know God you must know love. As a Buddhist, I thought I felt my faith was superior to theirs. I was wrong. Love is important to both religions. I have been dealing too long with the closed fist. Its time I opened my hand and choose for Sandburg was right. We meet by one or the other. I am tired of being angry.

Thank you, Mr. Sandburg.