Digging Squatting, my wife was digging in the field While I was digging, sitting on the ridge My wife was digging for the sweet potatoes And I was digging for poetry With an easy dig My wife dug out a sweet potato But I spent a long time Managing to dig out only a single line The more my wife dug the more delighted she was But the more I dug, the more frustrated I was The field where my wife had dug for the sweet potatoes Had furrows, long and short Meandering like lines of poetry Whereas the poems I had dug Had each line so knotty That it resembled the sweet potato, gnawed by the ground lizard Ren Yi (Ren Zhilin), born in the 1950s, is from Shanghai. He is now deputy secretary-general of the Pujiang Literature Society, deputy general manager of Pujiang Literature Exchange Centre for Literature and Arts, Minhang, Shanghai, and an editor of Pujiang Literature.