Red Leaf
By: Lan, Yi Fei
Translator: Janice Zhang

The red leaf that casted romance in your eyes a thousand years ago
slips into my dream in this season of poem creation.
The bell of the Forbidden City sounds far away,
The moat was long gone,
With only silence remaining.
My right hand that waved you off in the wind,
gloomy as the last rose I sent,
drops sadly in the dim twilight.

The red leaf with my poem on board is a lonely boat sailing towards sunset.
While I gaze for a moment,
It gradually merges into the distant fog.
Yet I am still a stone,
keep watching  by the riverside,
and overprinting your shadow into a tattoo of memory.
Tides come and go;
Reed flowers turn between green and white year after year,
Now quietly drift toward my hair fluttering in the wind.

Such startling years have gone through a thousand cycles.
In the reflection of the blue-eye-liked lake,
Wild geese flew by with trails of evolving calligraphy styles,
From WeiBei style in the beginning to Zhang Xu’s wild cursive style these days.
But when will your beautiful running script arrive,
with your return poem, written on a scarlet leaf?
In an unexpected fall like this,
Suddenly, the leaf falls.