To-morrow! did they say?
Hanyang
Spring
The toilet pots are very loud today.
It is spring and the warmth is highly favorable to fermentation.
Some odors are unbelievable.
At the corner of my street is an especially fragrant
reservoir. It is three feet in diameter, set flush
with the earth, and well filled.
Above it squats a venerable Chinaman with a face such
as Confucius must have worn.
His silk skirt is gathered daintily about his waist, and
his rounded rear is suspended in mid-air over the
broken pottery rim.
He gazes at me contemplatively as I pass with eyes in
which the philosophy of the ages has its dwelling.
I wonder whether he too feels the spring.
Wusih
Meditation
In all the city where I dwell two spaces only are wide
and clean.
One is the compound about the great church of the
mission within the wall; the other is the courtyard
of the great factory beyond the wall.
In these two, one can breathe.
And two sounds there are, above the multitudinous crying
of the city, two sounds that recur as time recurs—the
great bell of the mission and the
whistle of the factory.
Every hour of the day the mission bell strikes, clear,
deep-toned—telling perhaps of peace.
And in the morning and in the evening the factory
whistle blows, shrill, provocative—telling surely
of toil.
Now, when the mulberry trees are bare and the wintry
wind lifts the rags of the beggars, the day shift
at the factory is ten hours, and the night shift
is fourteen.
They are divided one from the other by the whistle,
shrill, provocative.
The mission and the factory are the West. What
they are I know.