Poems

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A community to link to or copy and paste poems. It is not complicated.

Formatting help: two blank spaces at the end of a line will show you the path in the edit window

most certainly learning the Unicode markdown labels for spacing

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and how to activate them for your or someone else's poetry.

if a poem's language settings make it at all difficult to mod i'm deleting it.

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TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com

TAOING translated by Ursula K. Le Guin (reddthat.com)

submitted 4 months ago by TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com to c/poems@reddthat.com

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TAOING

The way you can go
isn’t the real way.
The name you can say
isn’t the real name.

Heaven and earth
begin in the unnamed:
name’s the mother
of the ten thousand things.

So the unwanting soul
sees what’s hidden,
and the ever-wanting soul
sees only what it wants.

Two things, one origin,
but different in name,
whose identity is mystery.
Mystery of all mysteries!
The door to the hidden.

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[–] TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Note from UKLG: A satisfactory translation of this chapter is, I believe, perfectly impossible. It contains the book. I think of it as the Aleph, in Borges’s story: if you can see it rightly, it contains everything.

[–] TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com 2 points 4 months ago

from https://github.com/nrrb/tao-te-ching/blob/master/Ursula%20K%20Le%20Guin.md