To Czesław Miłosz

Abstract

To Czesław Miłosz Song Lin (bio) Translated by Ming Di and Frank Stewart In the years since your deaththe world has hardly changed,except that life has become even moreunpredictable. Disasters arrive like punishmentsfalling from the sky onto our plates,and rise up from under the earthand from the depths of the oceans.I read your poems again today, an exile’s wise wordsfrom Lithuania, like spring water, year after yearnourishing everyone who comes after you—like the Daoist cycle of renewal,life giving birth to water, water to wood,wood to fire—.And now, please tell me, will a new, morebeautiful planet be reborn from this burning world?Will it be a place with no secret police or censorship,no broken cities—as you called them—or decaying villages?A world in which people will lower their weapons,and with arms of kindness and strength,lift their oars and row together into a valleyprotected on all sides by the power of their humanity. Yes, all rivers should flow toward justice.But in my hometown, the river is drying up,shamefully depleted like a blue lizarddesiccated in the desert sun. I don’t knowwhether, looking down peacefully from the place you’re resting,you can see the flowing stream you created,so real it can almost be found on a map,and there is a leaf you praised, a stone you sang about,the eyelashes of a woman reflected in a stream.Your pure and generous words make me believe.in the blissful kingdom you imagined,and a river that will never die—like the river beneath the seathat emerged in a distant land carrying the god Alpheus.So is your voice carried through the dark night,to emerge like a long echo on an unexpected shore. 2011.6.29 [End Page 177] Song Lin Song Lin was born in Fujian in 1959. He graduated from East China Normal University in 1983, where he taught until he was jailed for nine months for his participation in the 1989 student demonstrations in Shanghai. He moved to France in 1991. The poetry editor of Bei Dao’s journal Today since 1992, he now lives in Dali, Yunnan province. Copyright © 2019 University of Hawai‘i Press