Bai Juyi

On the seventh day of the Seventh-month, in the Palace of Long Life,We told each other secretly in the quiet midnight worldThat we wished to fly in heaven, two birds with the wings of one,And to grow together on the earth, two branches of one tree."Earth endures, heaven endures; some time both shall end,While this unending sorrow goes on and on for ever.

Blossom time, drunk together, banishing spring sorrow;drunk, we broke off flowering limbs, counters for our rounds of wine.Suddenly I remembered my old friend, gone to the edge of the sky:by my reckoning, today he must have reached Liang-chou.