In Vain a Flying Chirp . . .

It's Freya's day . . .

The whole world is a series of miracles,

but we're so used to seeing them

that we call them ordinary things. – Hans Christian Anderson

Yu Xuanji was a 2500 year old Daoist priestist and poet. She was mentored by Wen Tingyn, himself the seminal poet of their time preceding the emergence of the Zen masters who probably read what little of her poetry remains then as now.

To Wen Tingyun on a Winter's Night

How unbearable, rummaging for poems

to read aloud beneath my lamp

on this long sleepess night …

I peek through the silk curtains

and pity the sinking moon …

Living inclusion, I don't just

nest in the phoenix's tree –

as the sun goes down

chirping sparrows circle the woods in vain.

– Yu Xuanji, in Yin Mountain: The Immortal Poetry of Three Daoist Women, transl. by Peter Levitt and Rebecca Nie, Shambhala, 2022.

Writing about poetry

acceds to a meta-poetry –

not unlike this present

feeble attempt, like Yu Xuanji

searching for poems to read in her bed

before sleep while chirping sparrows

circle the forest in vain for thousands of years.

— jab