By Yu Hongsheng

The deepest confession of love

Turns out to be the silence after a long, lingering gaze

A silence filled with overwhelming emptiness.

Only the setting sun,

Only the falling leaves;

Each drifts downward, tracing thoughts of its own kind.

In the low places lie traces of blood,

In the low places lies withering decay;

Higher up, through dappled light, come birdcalls grown strange.

Within those birdcalls is the fullness of autumn,

Is the yearning I half-understand, half-misgrasp.

Yet the hem of the wind

Has fluttered for five thousand years, up and down,

Missing dynasties,

Missing lines of verse.

Every recollection stings with astonishing sharpness

My loneliness is too perfect.

Philosophy and Logic

By Yu Hongsheng

The sky is stripped down to nothing but height,

Yet my height is reduced to nothing but loneliness.

Time is simple,

The world is obscure.

The flowing water seeks to reconcile with a setting sun in the lowlands

Fire and water merge,

Interpreting philosophy through a flame soaked through.

The plot of the wind,

The fragmented chapters of dreams;

They plagiarize and blend with each other, yet cannot escape falling.

The poignant beauty of autumn,

Retrieves logic by a cold, thin thread.

Thunder is the sky’s angry silence,

My silence is the melodious song of lightning.

Let Me Gaze at the Bright Moon

By Yu Hongsheng

Tonight is the moon’s moment of radiance.

In a straight line,

I will stand affectionately between the sun and the moon.

Though I know, on this night,

More leaves will fall too—

The autumn water grows slender,

The autumn mountains remain lush green—

 I still long to grant myself a moment of tranquility.

Let me gaze at the bright moon,

 As if returning to a Mid-Autumn Festival in the Tang Dynasty, to drink with Li Bai.

We could talk of unrecognized talent,

Of meeting the wrong people;

We could laugh freely,

Drink to our lofty spirits together.

Alas, I lack Li Bai’s literary genius,

Yet I can still laugh heartily and step out the door—

Laughing at the world,

And laughing at myself too.

If I Spend Ten Thousand Years Exploring Myself

By Yu Hongsheng

How pure a word is "purity"—

To use it for one’s feelings,

What nobility and self-restraint must one embody?

If I spend ten thousand years exploring myself,

The mountains and rivers will still stand firm,

The four seasons will still come and go in turn.

The imperfection and perfection of a blank sheet of paper—

Perhaps there is no boundary between them.

Allow me to spend a lifetime’s imagination,

Chasing shadows in pursuit of eternity.

Dreams fill a loneliness as vast as the sky—

Half is deep blue,

Half is empty space left bare.

Toward the autumn scenery unapproved and ununderstood,

I will stay silent and cautious,

Weeding out more adornments and vanity from it,

So that more radiance

May refract onto the edge where love and hatred intertwine,

And let the soul find peace.

Let Me Copy the Autumn

By Yu Hongsheng

The deeper silence

Must never be the bright, distant stars.

Compared to loss and imperfection,

All those restless, fidgety words seem so shallow.

Calmness runs deep,

Forbearance hides far—

Between the two, I choose silence:

Like a mountain,

Or like the sea.

Yet the horizon is a curve heaven reserved for me,

Breakthrough and guardianship,

Ink-splashing and blank-leaving,

All lie in the single thought where love and hatred intertwine.

Such a hasty, scribbled life—

How shall I write it in neat regular script,

Or turn it into a flowing running script?

Let me copy the autumn.

This season, at least, has a singular, graceful frame.

To That Time

By Yu Hongsheng

Then the wind rose,

Then the tide ebbed—

All my thoughts, caught in the setting sun, wove into verses and poems.

Desolation had waited three thousand years already;

What boundless loneliness it was.

Fishing by the shore,

Building a hut at the world’s edge;

Alone, I galloped freely in dreams—

Escaped the night,

Yet could not escape myself.

A single fallen leaf chanted sutras for me alone in the wind;

There were Tang poems and Song ci that stirred inspiration—

Some for reminiscing the past,

Some for yearning the far-off;

The rest left me to silence,

Eavesdropping on the waves’ eternal roar,

Sighing softly at the river’s course—

It turned out to share the same end as my peace. 

Author Profile

Yu Hongsheng, a native of Wuhan, Hubei Province, is a member of the China Poetry Society. His works have been published in various publications, including People's Literary Artist Magazine, River Poetry Journal, the special issue of Beijing Xiangshan Magazine (Anti-Epidemic Poetry Album), Hong Kong Genre Poetry Journal, and other publicly distributed newspapers. He has created more than 2,400 poems to date and also composed over a dozen songs that can be performed.