Grass Is Always Greener On The Other Side

While doodling with my brush writing, the first line came to my mind. Later, completed the first stanza during my jog. When I started to record the poem on paper that I suddenly thought of the idea of reversing the situation that a mortal turning into the wind and dreaming away as an immortal. Then in the end like the Butterfly Dream of Chuang Tzu.

1 水流溪清桃源花 Water flows purely in the stream of the peach blossom springs,
2 風成欲至伴芳華 And be the wind amongst the fragrance and a companion be.
3 莫見紅塵恩怨舊 See not the grateful and grudge of the red dust turning old,
4 何不樂滿歌樹下 Why not an utmost blast to have with a song under the trees?

5 逍遙眠漸幻黃粱 In carefreeness, slowly slumbering into a fantasy of the Yellow Sorghum,
6 矇矓聲折醒南丫 And groggily awakened by breaking sounds of the Southern Branch.
7 驚覺四周非人界 Startled into awareness that surroundings are those not of men,
8 瑤池仙子夢凡也 But a fairy of the Jasper Pool dreaming of a mortal world!

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peach_Blossom_Spring

3 red dust – the mundane world of mortals.

4 歌 can also be a verb in which case, the translation would have become “to sing”

5 http://jeffinous.blogspot.com/2011/02/dream-of-southern-bough-chinese-antz.html

6 See above. 柯 does not rhyme in Cantonese but 丫means the same.

8 The Jasper Pool belongs to the Queen Mother of the West, 西王母 believed to be in the vicinity of the Kunlun mountains (崑崙山).

Wednesday, January 25, 2023