As is my wont, when political disappointment (it might be fairer to say, disappointment in my country) occurs, I retreat into literature or other such distractions. Today I present a poem (Chinese, naturally) from the Song Dynasty, by Lu Yu. Like his contemporaries, he was a scholar gentleman, serving in the government of the day, and was noteworthy for his great interest in tea drinking. He wrote The Classic of Tea, no doubt a seminal work in its time. He also discovered that the quality of the water affected the quality of the tea made from it.

I love this poem, Rain on the River, and often return to it. The translation is by Ken Rexroth with some minor alterations to punctuation by me.

In the fog we drift hither
and yon over the dark waters.
At last our little boat finds
shelter under a willow bank.
At midnight I am awake,
heavy with wine. The smoky
lamp is still burning. The rain
is still sighing in the bamboo
thatch of the cabin of the boat.