送别
秦樓幾夜愜心期，
不料仙郎有別離。
睡覺莫言雲去處，
殘燈一醆野蛾飛。
Those nights of pleasure at the pavilion –
I never thought you could leave.
But clouds disperse, wordlessly,
And I sleep alone;
still, around the wicked lamp, now fading,
a wild moth flutters.
Yu Xuan-Ji (魚玄機) defies easy categorization. She was born in the Tang dynasty around 844 and died around 871, at the age of twenty-eight. Those 28 years however were a life lived to the fullest imaginable: she was well-educated, extremely intelligent, and consorted with a number of the famous poets of the Tang dynasty. The second wife of an official, she was driven away by the jealousy of the first wife, and apparently became a courtesan to survive; this in fact exposed her to the widest variety of culture and life. All of this is reflected in her poetry, of which we have 50-some poems still extant, and in which she explored not only a spectrum of metre and style, but what it means to be human. She was erudite yet plain, visual yet thoroughly versed in the language of the heart, and fearless in her political criticism.
The Fat Monk 