张旭诗
Poems of Zhang Xu
Index
桃花溪
Peach Blossom Creek
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隐隐飞桥隔野烟 石矶西畔问渔船 桃花尽日随流水 洞在清溪何处边 |
Beyond the hidden flying bridge, wild mists gather. Beneath the west bank's stony cliff, I stop to ask a fisher. "All day long these peach blossoms have floated down the stream. This cave here, where the creek runs out, where to does it lead?" |
-- 张旭
废话
I believe this is the Zhang Xu poem from the Three Hundred Tang Poems. There is a peach blossom story that runs through Chinese literature. In the 4th century, a fisherman came to a cave in a stream. He thought he could see daylight at the far end. So he went in and then out the other side. There he found a village where people had lived an ideal life -- Zhuangzi-style ideal, where you live simply, write with knots, and never want to go anywhere else -- for the last seven hundred years. They treated him like an honored guest and he learned they knew nothing of anything that had happened in the long interim. The next day he left and reported to the magistrate what he had found. But no one could ever find the cave again.