The bright moon shines faintly on drifting snow; thin clouds float past with a drunken haze. Snow shadows light as catkins gradually subside, while scattered gulls answer low murmured calls. A cold evening wind blows from the clear riverbank, and green mountains reveal their lean, jade-like bones. Looking back, I see the upright brightness of snow reflected at the window, and pale mist hanging low over mountain hollows.

回文: text that can form meaningful language again when read character by character in reverse. Read backward and divided into new lines, this lyric can become a lyric to the tune of “巫山一段云” (A Wisp of Cloud over Mount Wu).

飞琼: beautiful jade dancing through the air, a metaphor for snow. 中（zhòng）酒: to become drunk. 盈盈: light and graceful. 咒: to chant or call out; the word order in “轻鸥咒” is constrained by the palindrome. The translation interprets it as a scene of chanting to call light-flying gulls, rather than as evidence of a folk custom.

浦: the water’s edge. 玉骨: “jade bones,” likening the mountain’s lean, white form after snow to jade. 亭亭: standing upright and graceful. 岫 (xiù): a mountain peak or cave; here, the mountains.

Read in reverse, the text is: “岫垂烟淡淡，窗映雪亭亭。看回瘦骨玉山青，寒风晚浦晴。咒鸥轻点点，飘絮舞盈盈。尽收酒中薄云阴，琼飞淡月明。” (“Faint mist hangs over the peaks; stately snow is reflected in the window. Looking back, the jade mountain's lean bones are green; a cold wind blows over the clear evening riverbank. Invoked gulls lightly dot the scene; drifting catkins dance gracefully. Gather all the thin clouds' shade into the wine; jade flakes fly beneath the pale, bright moon.”) As a result, some meanings are more compressed than in ordinary ci lines.

Reading guide: Dong Yining brings a snowy river, a clear moon, and mountain mist into a lyric that can be read backward. Readers can enjoy the clear, cold scene in its forward reading, then try the other tune pattern to experience how the images remain connected when the word order changes.

Moon, clouds, flying snow, and light gulls give the first stanza an airy quality, while the evening wind and the mountains' bones make the second clear and austere. The recurring words “淡” (pale), “轻” (light), and “瘦” (lean) together regulate the picture's intensity.

A reversible poem requires the same sequence of characters to accommodate two sentence patterns, so its reading can involve compression and abrupt transitions. Its appeal lies in how relationships among the images can be rearranged with the reading direction. Appreciation can preserve this experimental quality without inventing a definite story for every phrase.