Offering, By Luowu Muga Poem by Denis Mair

The shapes of trees and rocks
Are deeply immersed in winter,
A ceremony is incubating
Rows of branches stretch toward snowy clearings,
Where earth meets sky, sunbeams pierce clouds;
A white lane leads toward wakefulness.

A branch hints that something is emerging;
A tree is an emblem of a man;
Trees in a row are emblems of a generation;
My holy branch extends behind me...a slumbering village
Not proclaiming its secrets;
Hours that need to be retold
Pace back and forth in a valley.

The bimo's piercing eyes survey the land;
Could there be a door openable by his tinkling brass bell?
I have used up all words at my disposal
All my ardent flames
To get a glimpse of tantalizing wisps
In cobwebs beyond that door,
Yet amid the sounds of chanting
A sigh gradually becomes perceptible,
Coming from seventy generations in the past;
Perhaps somewhere, in an era even more remote,
Generations before that, back to the hundredth
Or even the two hundredth, are being chanted
By an even higher bimo.

The departed are guided homeward by the scripture
To pass through darkness and reach the ancestors' pasture
To remain in a season abloom with bright flowers;
That is the native place, the endpoint
It is the world on which I meditate.

We are still going forward
By now we have traveled past
High mountains and defiles
Past grasslands and rivers
Past the limit of memory.

There will come a day
I will seat myself on the grass
On the edge of a meadow
I will cease my steps and blessedly pay heed
To sounds of a stream disappearing in my ears.

translated by Denis Mair