Note on Birthday

April is the cruelest month, quoted from the Economist.

Unfortunately I was born in this month.

No clue to chase out what happened in that April 47 years ago, whether things made it more benign. Surely many things happened everyday, and everywhere.

Spring is a harsh season, those still lingering will come to die, the drifted snow in the shadowy corner; while newborns cry out a new world, with all their strengths and destinies; a world with it, never existed before. It can be a flower, a virus, or a pandemic.

Flowers bloom and fade, viruses spread and mutate, but a pandemic is a pandemic forever. It axed, scythed, bombed, a pain for ever, for everyone.

Last week I got a snapshot from a friend traveling in Tibetan Yunan, a blooming tree    overhangs out of a cliff. I liked that picture and left this message: I want to hang myself on that blooming tree.

People around me know I love trees, branches, twigs and leaves. For that my mum has her rationale that I was born under the blessing of a tree.

The tree in San Francisco has an open park to spread, leaving a long and lonely shadow against the sun.

San Francisco is a sunny city as one of my pullover labeled on the chest “Sun Francisco”. Now it besieged, sunshine would not stop the virus.

April is indeed the cruelest month, even the Poetry Society of America asked for Reading in the Dark, poets reflect on the poems they return to in difficult times.

In the first page, I find this from Nazim Hikmet:

On Living

I

Living is no laughing matter:

you must live with great seriousness

like a squirrel, for example—

I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,

I mean living must be your whole occupation.

Living is no laughing matter:

you must take it seriously,

so much so and to such a degree

that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,

your back to the wall,

or else in a laboratory

in your white coat and safety glasses,

you can die for people—

even for people whose faces you've never seen,

even though you know living

is the most real, the most beautiful thing.

I mean, you must take living so seriously

that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees—

and not for your children, either,

but because although you fear death you don't believe it,

because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

II

Let's say we're seriously ill, need surgery—

which is to say we might not get up

from the white table.

Even though it's impossible not to feel sad

about going a little too soon,

we'll still laugh at the jokes being told,

we'll look out the window to see if it's raining,

or still wait anxiously for the latest newscast. . .

Let's say we're at the front—

for something worth fighting for, say.

There, in the first offensive, on that very day,

we might fall on our face, dead.

We'll know this with a curious anger,

but we'll still worry ourselves to death

about the outcome of the war, which could last years.

Let's say we're in prison

and close to fifty,

and we have eighteen more years, say,

before the iron doors will open.

We'll still live with the outside,

with its people and animals, struggle and wind—

I mean with the outside beyond the walls.

I mean, however and wherever we are,

we must live as if we will never die.

III

This earth will grow cold,

a star among stars

and one of the smallest,

a gilded mote on blue velvet—

I mean this, our great earth.

This earth will grow cold one day,

not like a block of ice

or a dead cloud even

but like an empty walnut it will roll along

in pitch-black space . . .

You must grieve for this right now

—you have to feel this sorrow now—

for the world must be loved this much

if you're going to say “I lived”. . .

  —Translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk

With that, I end this note and live.