At the beginning I noticed nothing,
too many stones by the dead river.
No gratitude for truth or beauty
Those I loved gone.

I felt like an illegitimate child
walking across an invisible border.
Rejected by its parents,
no one left, a black world.

A kite dived in front of me
I thought it was a sign
The corpse of a dead idea I once had.
Then I saw you, the last of your kind.

Obeying time as before and unknown to myself,
I listened to your voice
To you, a room is a cell of unreadable books
subtle and grey in the morning light.

As the clouds gathered over Mt. Wutai
You whispered in my ear
Nature now came close.
And brought back what I had lost long ago.