CHONGQING, Nov. 8 (Xinhua) -- In a small village in southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, the rhythm of life is being rewritten not only by the seasons, but by the pen.
Baiyang is a rural community with just 3,685 people in Dianjiang County. Whenever they have time to spare, a small group of villagers set down their hoes to compose verses about their daily life. They gather regularly to read their work aloud, turning agricultural wisdom into communal art.
"Hands on the hoe, we pull the weeds from the stubborn earth... Labor, and the barn will fill with grain. Be idle, and life thins to a stark and empty field."
At a monthly meeting of the Mountain Spring poetry club, dozens of villagers chanted the lines, tapping the rhythm on their laps.
The group is led by Lu Junhao, 64, a self-taught poet, doctor and former village official. Having completed two years of high school, he was considered well-educated by the standards of the early 1980s. Passionate about literature since childhood, Lu loves writing both classical and contemporary poetry.
Villagers long turned to Lu for help with paperwork, from updating genealogies to composing text for the village's painted cultural walls. Over time, some began to share his love of writing and sought an outlet for their own thoughts and emotions.
A small group came together in 2010 to form a club of amateur poets. They named it Mountain Spring, hoping their poetry would be as clean and pure as mountain water, said Lu, who has since spent more time editing others' work than writing his own.
A general practitioner by profession, Lu runs his village clinic in the same building as the poetry club's meeting room. On his desk sit a blood-pressure monitor, a stethoscope and a prescription pad, but piles of poetry manuscripts fill the drawers.
The poems arrive on scraps of paper, cigarette packets and lined notebooks. Many are written in illegible handwriting. Lu must call the authors to confirm their meaning before typing them out one by one on a handwriting tablet connected to his old computer. He tries not to revise the verses.
"Keeping it authentic is what makes us unique," Lu said.
Over the past 16 years, the club has published 42 editions of its magazine and collected more than 500 poems. Lu edits, proofreads and typesets the publication himself, often paying the printing costs out of pocket.
For some members, writing is a way to process grief. Dong Zerong began composing after his eldest son died of an illness in 2001, not long after the young man graduated from university. One of Dong's early verses reads:
"Life is no easy road. One must bear the bitter and the sweet. Be humble when honored, and be patient in defeat."
Dong said he felt a deep sense of relief after pouring his grief into poetry. He later worked as a migrant laborer in east China's Zhejiang Province, but never stopped composing verses. His lyrics about life on the production line drew widespread attention and earned him an interview with a local TV station.
Now retired back home in Baiyang village, he still farms and does odd jobs such as plumbing and electrical repairs, all while continuing to write. His wife, Zhang Kaisu, said he hums verses wherever he goes and fills cigarette packets with drafts. "The recognition I received for my writing meant more to me than any paycheck," he said.
Huang Mingfu, the club's deputy editor and one of its most published authors, once poured his homesickness into verse while working far from home. One of his lines describes his village as "where there are winding paths, where one observes beans and rice in tranquility, where rain feeds life, and where the sun pours its light."
Over the years, some members have died, younger ones have left for work, but some migrants have returned and joined the club. The group now has 32 members, nine of them aged 80 or older. The youngest is 51.
Fu Changjun, 80, once dreamed of flying as a pilot but ended up working as a teacher and never left the countryside. "To know your hometown deeply is to love it true," he wrote.
Lu compares these farmers' poetry to wildflowers growing on the edge of a paddy field; in the crops, they are pulled as weeds, but when kept in a garden, they are admired. "I feel like the one who picks them up one by one and plants them in pots," he said. ■
