Monday, April 28, 2014

2 by ko un


One white butterfly,
ghost of wisdom, is flying
over the foolish sea.





Decades of language—
despite misuse, abuse, violence—
is not your language you?
You must protect the nouns,
the hometown you used to look down on
from the hilltops that since have disappeared,
abolished souls,
the verbs, adverbs, sad adjectives
that vanished during the city night,
were abolished
to become a civilisation of the past,

and at length its skeleton.