FORGIVE
   
   
   
   

   
   Hatred I need no longer to
   learn or to erase from my experience in this life
   gaining though it is among the new generation
   I feel the century change, grasped
   by desiccated claws of that crowd of old men who, exiled by
   their century, try to carry the century into exile with them
   I stand between crabbed youth and age. As if crossing a bridge
   I move along this pestilential century
   I know exactly what I'm doing
   When I stop thinking, stop writing, when I stare
   at crowds on both sides of the bridge and beneath its arches
   I hear them railing against me
   They curl under the weight of their own self-oppression
   Sperm spurts from their tongues
   When I stop writing
   I know they are part of the century's sickness
   excited by hatred, by self-abuse
   They're spunky and they get to the top
   Some of them pass themselves off as poets
   and devote their whole day drawing
    doodles of their cocks
   
   
   I've more important things to do in this life
   I need to study, to listen for the soul's instruction
   amid jeering crowds and unjust treatment
   to lift life to a cleaner higher level
   I'm crossing the bridge that leads to the ultimate
   watching this new breed's viral growth
   witnessing violence and poverty—hatred like a mother
   carries those twins. The old eventually
   chuck their hopes while the young
   go on cheering. Material desires
   thrust up like a totem for our century
   My life is to be lonely and to write
   and to engage my soul in pondering
   Out my window: polluted rain on spoiled landscape and
   the bawling of a coming generation just squeezing
   through the narrow gate of carnal desire to be
   plopped on the operating table
   
   
   Crimes are the lessons we've to learn in
   this life. See the present century
   hectic from head to toe, delirious with fever
   lost in new litters of humanity
   Floods of people, flowing through long years
   the century's purulence. With hatred
   with ignorance, a passion for self-abuse and
   excelling imagination, they join in history's
   crime and degradation. They're alive and
   well. In the process of human awakening and
   purification, evil
   is what we have to take into account
   
   
   
   
   
   
   XUE DI
   trans by Wang Ping and Keith Waldrop