[Suffering from the bitter cold of the heavy snow, I couldn’t sleep at midnight and wrote two poems (Part I)]

By Zhang Lei (Song Dynasty)

There are no people around due to the heavy snow,

I closed the wooden door and knew nothing about the outside world.

The horn sounds far away in the cold city,

The rooster crows lately in this quiet place.

The time flying away, I feel lost,

The distress or eminent are only understood by myself.

Now, what I only care about is the meal and sleep,

While the weather and Dao will last forever.

About the Poet:
Zhang Lei (1054-1114), nicknamed Wenqian, known on the streets as Keshan, was also called Master Wanqiu or Zhang Youshi. He was tall and fat, so people also called him “Fei xian” (which means fat immortal). It is said that when he was hungry, his belly would sound like thunder and his sweat drops came down like rain. According to the poems of his friends, he resembled Maitreya, a god of Buddhism. As he describes in this poem, he had experienced eminence and distress. He was one of the four most famous disciples of Su Dongpo, a well-known poet and statesman of the Song Dynasty, though his later life was very pitiful. Two of his three sons were killed in the war and the last one was killed by bandits on his way to his brothers’ funeral.