Zen Poems
Charms
Charms
Solitary glitters on the windshields drowsing on the zebra-parallels of life,
Twilight asks, what is your name? Dandelion’s Light, Grass’s Breath.
But nobody answers it’s God’s Sigh trilling on the wind’s eyebrows.
Dreams dye the nameless moonlights on the mind’s fingertips, glissando.
(Annotation)
How can you fasten the season’s knots? Winter withdraws its left hand and Spring slides in with its right hand strewing yellow polka dots on the green grass. Sunlight whispers the season’s voices, ‘Arise as glitters on car windows, flower petals, grass knives, and my eyebrows’. All things are verified its forms by sunrays and air gamuts . Motion proves their lives. Seeing with somnambulant eyes, they talk about their beings. This is the only thing different from dream, where every neuron moves but without light, sound, name, and mind, probably without their finger points whispering to the stuck moon. Spring of real light, not neurons’, sneaks into the seeing mind, imaginative or imaginary, onto the sun-beamed eyes, tired of silent dreams of life. Unknown things in life has no name, but charming; dandelion’s light, grass’s breath, reed’s pride, pink’s petticoat, and God’s shit in the day dreams, they are all charms of life, even not aesthetic beauty, but definitely graceful, sublime, and divine.
Prater Puissant, Pater Patriae
A powerful talker whips and whets the father of country with a bamboo rod.
A fool-natured monk wets his self-pride bonfire with proper mind.
At last Sŏn sword swish snips the Snow Land of Buddha, limpid,
“My mind is the autumn moon. Now I wrap it into my sleeve.”
Nestling on his cloth horse, breeze-trumpeting in deep pine forest,
A poet writes all his consoles of equal value, rough but polite,
“Fleecy clouds embrace the profoundest stone-mind on earth.”
He repeats the primal Fathers’ discourses, rash but flesh-warm.
Papa’s dharmas, soft and clean, soar over the water jar, brimless, slowly
fill and wheel the infinite pond of myriad icons, indexes, and names,
invisible to busy eyes, visible to fresh winds and the blue moon.
A true smoker’s attention never misses the tiniest sign of “Tobacco.”
Mind paints a picture by itself in the body. It flows with yellow, red, purple smokes of light (neurons) in the mental cave. Things happen inside us as facts (reality), not fictitious ideas. Chance or self-determination can make the facts understood cognitively or affectively and embodied conatively. Instinct/intuition lets them known to us as true knowledge when understood and felt by us and as theoretical wisdom when delivered to others. Knowledge, mind, and acts come from the natural experience of the first idea. Mind can be facts in the future-tense experience. Free will can develop itself by practice stage by stage. At the last moment, poets can write without words, not by saying anything, as cloud and stone do. He can be Papa Dharma, Pater of difference, never too late !