My Boat Struck Something Deep - Juan Ramon Jimenez

 

My Boat Stuck Something Deep

March 4, 2013 by Coral Lorax

“My boat struck something deep.
Nothing happened.
Sound, silence, waves.

Nothing happened?

Or perhaps, everything happened

And I’m sitting in the middle of my new life.”

– Juan Ramon Jimenez

Nobel Laureate for Literature in 1956

Left Spain at beginning of Spanish Civil War, 1936.

This poem first heard thanks to Hugh Byrne on 6/13/2021

At Seven Mile Rapids - Su T'ung Po (1037-1101)

At Seven Mile Rapids

A light boat, one lone leaf,
a startled swan, two oars.

Water and sky are pure Clarity, reflecting deep.
Waves smooth, fish roil this duckwood mirror, 
And egrets dot misty shorelines. 

We breeze past sandy streams, 
frostfall streams cold,
Moonlight streams aglow.

Ridge above ridge, like a painting.
Bend beyond bend like a screen. 

Here I think back to Yen Zi Ling's empty old age, 
Lord and recluse, one dream. 
Renown's empty then as now.

Just mountains stretching away,
Cloud mountains erratic, 
Dawn mountains green.

-- Su T'ung Po (1037-1101), translated by David Hinton, in 'Mountain Home: The wilderness poetery of Ancient China', page 226, published 2014.

Ideas from Thoreau

Ideas from Thoreau. The row THOREaU.
Thoreaus message about time and eternity. We drink from eternity not a stream...
I also thought of the passage from the writer who said that doing meditation is a refuge not a test. Certainly the Thoreau's poem is about drinking in the stream of eternity, a metaphor for meditation and meditation as a refuge.

In my thinking I also wanted to talk about my poem the Guru Gurumph.