秋意 / Autumn Mood

秋風奔馬呼聲叫﹐
落葉蝶膀霧影飄﹔
葉靜風停回憶看﹐
秋風再起未來雕。

The autumn wind, like the breath of a sprinting horse, howls,
The falling leaves, like the shadow of the wings of a butterfly in heavy fog, float;
When the leaves are still and the wind is paused, memories are reviewed,
But when the autumn wind rises again it carves the future.

* * *

This is probably my first poem in Chinese in which the meter is actually correct. I finally understand how the meter works, and, I have to say, writing in the Chinese meter is incredibly difficult, especially since I do not have enough Chinese vocabulary.

The Chinese meter depends on the tone of the character. In the Chinese language, the character's pronounciation is a combination of the sound and the tone of the character. Hence two characters may have the same sound (e.g. piao), but one may be in the first tone, and the other in the second (and there are four tones in total). The Chinese meter is determined by the tone of the character. The meter has two parts, called "ping" and "zi". This is kind of like the English "stress" and "not-stressed". In my poem, the meter goes something like this:

ping ping zi zi ping ping zi, (a)
zi zi ping ping zi zi ping; (b)
zi zi ping ping ping zi zi, (c)
ping ping zi zi zi ping ping. (b)

(The letter at the end refers to the rhyming scheme.) With the necessity to fit in the meter, writing parallel structures become a lot more difficult, since many words do not fit in with the meter, even though in terms of parallels they are perfect fit. If this poem seems especially bad, please forgive me. It is the first time I tried with the correct meter. May experience give me better poems!