”THE DEMILITARIZED ZONE

Here is the cross-road of Hell,
Under the white clouds floating below the blue stars,
Where the red lumps of flesh,
And the dark-red clods of iron,
Burnt aflame continuously and fell down.

Though the powder smoke covered the battlefield was now cleared,
In the valleys of hill-pass where the mist is now cleared,
There is no single pine-tree where birds may dwell,
Nor a wild chrysanthemum where bees or butterflies may stop.
Is it because the heat of the earth is already cooled off,
Or the bullet-scars are too deep in the naked surface of the earth?

Even though the wild bush grew into a faded grace
In the front garden of Panmunjôm,
What nightmare are you going to plot again,
You, the Demilitarized Zone, entangled with barbed wire,
155 miles from the east to the west,
And 4 kilo-meters from the south to the north?

Pondering all through the long, long autumn night,
I admit the map is our own.
Only the hostile aliens whose speech quite unknown to us
Got a more miserable heart than Brigadier-General Duds’s
Who was captured again by prisoners
In the miracle of the ultra-atomic age that owned freedom.
Whom shall I appeal to, then?

Climbing up the blue mossy rocks,
Under the maples all over the mountain,
How long must I keep standing here, face to face,
Vacantly with you, the fallen leaves as my friend,
As if I were a fading pine-tree of drooping branches?”

--Ho-gang Zang, op cit

“America is like England. America is very much what England would be
with the two hundred most interesting people removed.” --Ezra Pound (1914)

"Men who get tired of struggling with reality commit suicide. Nations
that get tired go to war." --Lewis Mumford, 1918

"The number of protons in the universe is about 10 to the 80th power. The
number of possible games of chess is much larger, perhaps 10 to the 10
to the 50th... If the universe were the chessboard, the protons the chessmen,
and any interchange in the position of two protons a move, then the number
of possible games would be something like the Skewes number [10 to the
10 to the 10 to the 34th power]." --G H Hardy, Ramanujan

"...l'objectif est une des formes du subjectif." --Remy de Gourmont