Grieving Over Chentao
Early winter, young men of good families from ten districts,
their blood was the water in Chentao’s marshes.
The moors were vast, the sky clear, no sounds of battle—
forty thousand loyalist troops died on the very same day.
Bands of Hu came back, blood washed their arrows,
still singing Khitan songs they drank in the capital market.
The capital’s citizens turned their faces weeping toward the north,
day and night they keep looking for the royal army to come.