Bai Juyi

Bai Juyi (Po Chü-i) was born into a country ravaged by famine and drought in the wake of the An Lushan Rebellion. Only 22 when his father died, Bai worked menial jobs to provide when he could while his mother begged for food and shelter when he couldn’t. Though he came from a common family, he still passed the national magistrate exams at a young age. Around the same time, he found an audience for poems he refined by reading aloud to an old peasant and rewriting any line she couldn’t understand. In the middle of Bai’s career, his mother died after falling into a well while she was looking at flowers. During his time at home for the customary three-year mourning period, his daughter also died. He then started a slow voluntary retreat from the court. A forced exile accelerated this reclusion after the court found fault in one poem he wrote about greedy officials and another he wrote about looking at flowers by a well. In his exile, he wrote more poetry and studied Buddhism, spending much of his time at monasteries. He lost another child. In his seventies, his health started to fail. He left manuscripts of his collected works at multiple temples to ensure they survived. After he died, the emperor waged a campaign against Buddhism and tore down nearly every temple in every region. All of Bai’s original manuscripts he housed with monks were destroyed, but by then admirers had made plenty of copies.

A frail and ancient man from Hsin-feng, eighty-eight years old,
hair and eyebrows white as fresh snow: he slowly makes his way

toward the inn’s front gate, leaning on a great-great-grandson,
his left arm over the boy’s shoulder, his right broken at his side.

If you ask this old man how many years his arm’s been broken,
if you ask how it happened, an arm broken like that, he’ll say:

When I was born at my home village in the district of Hsin-feng,
it was an age of sage rule, never a hint of wartime campaigns,

so I grew up listening to the flutes and songs of the Pear Garden,
knowing nothing at all about spears and flags, bow and arrows.

Then suddenly, in the T’ien-pao reign, they began building armies,
and for every three men in every household, one was taken away,

taken and hurried away. And can you guess where they all went?
To Yün-nan, a march five months and ten thousand miles long,

a march everyone kept talking about: how you face the Lu River
and malarial mists that rise and drift when pepper blossoms fall,

how great armies struggle to cross the river’s seething floodwaters,
and before they make it across, two or three in ten are drowned.

North of home, south of home, wailing filled villages everywhere,
sons torn from fathers and mothers, husbands torn from wives,

for people knew what it meant to make war on southern tribes:
ten million soldiers are sent away, and not one comes back alive.

It was all so long ago. I was hardly even twenty-four back then,
but my name was listed on those rolls at the Department of War,

so in the depths of night, careful to keep my plan well-hidden,
I stole away, found a big rock, and hacked my arm until it broke.

Too lame to draw a bow or lift banners and flags into the wind,
I escaped: they didn’t send me off to fight their war in Yün-nan.

It was far from painless, the bone shattered and muscles torn,
but I’d found a way to go back and settle quietly in my village.

Now sixty years have come and gone since I broke this arm:
I gave up a limb, it’s true, but I’m still alive, still in one piece,

though even now, on cold dark nights full of wind and rain,
I’m sleepless all night long with pain and still awake at dawn.

Sleepless with pain,
but free of regrets,
for I’m the only man in my district who lived to enjoy old age.

If I hadn’t done it, I’d have ended where the Lu River begins,
a dead body, my spirit adrift and my bones abandoned there,

just one of ten thousand ghosts drifting above southern graves,
gazing toward their home, all grief-torn and bleating, bleating.

When such elders speak
how can we ignore them?

Haven’t you heard
the story of Sung K’ai-fu, Prime Minister in the K’ai-yüan reign,
how he nurtured peace by refusing to reward frontier victories?

Haven’t you heard
the story of Yang Kuo-chung, Prime Minister in the T’ien-pao,
how he launched frontier campaigns to flatter the emperor,

how the people were wild with anger before he won anything?
Just ask him, ask the old man from Hsin-feng with a broken arm.

Riding proud in the streets, parading
horses that glisten, lighting the dust…

When I ask who such figures could be,
people say they’re imperial favorites:

vermilion sashes—they’re ministers;
and purple ribbons—maybe generals.

On horses passing like drifting clouds
they swagger their way to an army feast,

to those nine wines filling cup and jar
and eight dainties of water and land.

After sweet Tung-t’ing Lake oranges
and mince-fish from a lake of heaven,

they’ve eaten to their hearts’ content,
and happily drunk, their spirits swell.

There’s drought south of the Yangtze:
in Ch’ü-chou, people are eating people.

When I went home yesterday, these blossoms had just opened red.
I’m back again tonight, but already the branches are half empty.

And while I sit mourning ravaged blossoms you never saw bloom,
a sudden wind scatters the rest through blazing moonlight away.

An early cricket sings clear, then stops.
A lamp flickers out, then flares up again.

Outside the window, telling me evening
rain’s come: a clattering in banana trees.

At Golden-Oriole Lane, orioles are just beginning to sing,
and at Crow-and-Magpie Stream, ice is beginning to thaw.

Water stretches away everywhere, swells all emerald green,
three-hundred-ninety bridges flaunting crimson handrails,

and ducks drift in pairs, wings close and ripples mingling,
where willows weave their branches together by the million.

There’s no asking whether spring winds come early or late:
they arrive in the morning where yesterday becomes today.

A three-year-old son, lone pearl treasured so in the hand.
A sixty-year-old father, hair a thousand streaks of snow,

I can’t think through it—you become some strange thing,
and sorrow endless now you’ll never grow into a person.

There’s no swordstroke clarity when grief tears the heart,
and tears darkening my eyes aren’t rinsing red dust away,

but I’m still nurturing emptiness—emptiness of heaven’s
black black, this childless life stretching away before me.

Splendor and ruin, sorrow and joy, long life or early death:
when this human realm’s a figment of prank and whimsy,

is it really so strange if I’m soon a bug’s arm or rat’s liver?
And chicken skin or crane plumage—what would it hurt?

In yesterday’s winds, I was happy to begin my long journey,
but today, in all this sunlit warmth of spring, I feel better.

And now that I’m packed and ready for that distant voyage,
what does it matter if I linger on a little while longer here?