“West Lake flower garden: a desert, now.
Alone, at the window, I read through old pages.
A smudge of rouge, a scent of perfume, but
I still weep.
Is there a Fate for books?
Why mourn for a half-burned poem?
There is nothing, there is no one to question,
and yet this misery feels like my own.
Ah, in another three hundred years
will anyone weep, remembering my fate?”

"Reading Hsiao-ch'ing", in The Harpercollins World Reader: The Modern World, eds. Mary Ann Caws and Christopher Prendergast (HarperCollins Publishers, 1994), ISBN 978-0065013832, p. 1411
Hsiao-Ching was "a seventeenth-century poet who was forced to become a concubine to a man whose jealous primary wife burned almost all of her poems" — David Damrosch, "Global Scripts and the Formation of Literary Traditions", in Approaches to World Literature (2013), p. 98