AFTER MID-AUTUMN,SITTING ALONE ON A BARREN HILL By Dong Li

AFTER MID-AUTUMN,SITTING ALONE ON A BARREN HILL

Dong Li

Old Heaven has a long, drawn-out face,

someone must owe him 800,000 in cash plus interest.

The hills are overflowing with little wild daisies,

    but not a single one of them knows

why the sun flowers were all executed in autumn.

Midway in the sky, sparrow hawks screech.

Are they looking for mates

or hunting for food?

I sit on the hilltop, alone,

not thinking about my tumbledown village.

The farmers are harvesting at foothill,

looking neither happy or sad.

Singing comes from a distance; it’s the sound of a marriage,

the same music as a funeral,

as if alluding to a maxim:

There's nothing new under the sun.

About the poet:

Dong Li was born in January 1966 in Fengnan, Hebei Province. He attended primary and secondary schools in rural areas and was admitted to Anhui Huaibei Normal University of Mining and Technology in September 1985. After graduating in July 1989, he was assigned to work at Hebei Kailuan (Group) Co., Ltd. He later obtained a master's degree and joined the China Writers Association in 2009. Currently, he serves as the deputy editor-in-chief of an enterprise-run newspaper and was a student of the 14th Advanced Seminar for Young and Middle-aged Writers at the Lu Xun Literature Institute.

His works have been published in provincial and national-level publications such as Poetry Periodical, Stars, Journal of Selected Poems, Poetry Monthly and Yangtze River Poetry Journal. Many of his works have also been included in various anthologies including Selected Chinese Poems, Annual Chinese Poems, Yearbook of Chinese Poems and Almanac of Chinese New Poetry. He has won several awards including the 5th National Coal Mining Literature Wujin Award, the 2007-2008 Sunshine Literature Award, the 3rd China Best Poetry Editor Award and the 1st Hebei Poet Award. He has published a poetry collection Arriving from the Afternoon and a collection of prose and literary criticism Below Life. In his spare time, he acts as the chief editor of Phoenix.