Pale wine brewed fresh ‘pon my mountain return,
and fair fowl peck feed to grow plump in fall
I call help to pair pale wine with roast fowl,
while children jeer and grab at my plain clothes
I sing aloud and seek wine to self-soothe,
dancing to vie with sunrise for splendor

Lobbying high suffers from time in lack,
horse whipped to reach a far-off place on clock
In Kuaiji, that fool wife disdained Maichen,*
and I, too, leave home for the capital.
Head back, I laugh as I head out the door;
how could I be a man of the wildlands?

Several times beneath budding flowers have I sat to play the xiao
Those red walls as distant to gaze at as the river of stars itself
It appears that these stars persist from that very night of long ago
But for whom do I stand in this wind and this dew, on this evening?
My heartfelt emotions are at their end, the silk of a worm’s cocoon
My tortuous mind is flayed and abandoned, like the peel of a fruit*
I think of you as you were, on that full moon of your full fifteenth year
And this pathetic cup of wine I have now will not soothe my yearning

Reminded of Xizhou by plum blossoms, she snaps a branch off to send to Jiangbei.
Her lightweight clothes were an apricot-red; her hair was black as a crow chick’s feathers.
Where might I find Xizhou proper, today? Row ‘cross the bridgehead in two long oar strokes.
At the sun’s curtain call, the shrikes fly off, and night’s wind blows against the tallow trees.