|
Selected Poems of Jing Wa
|
|
|
Sixty years of flower wreaths
Sixty years gone by since your blood was shed
Still there is no German doorway
Not darkened by your footprints
Sixty years of bullets
Sixty years and more since your imprisonment
I toy with imprisonment of spirit
How it flees straight from smokestack to sealed-off camp
Still not too late for paying respects
Quiet grievance pressed in rough stone on your chest
Like a skylight, so radiant
Memorial poppies of Hamburg and guns of Auschwitz ,
All made radiant
I want to say, Schindler's List is a radiant troop
I want to say Schindler's List
Under the night sky is radiant Israel
Sunlight kept away, from your back I lay down
Count the stars like pearls
Scent of butter lamps drifts to the sky-burial ground
Our love has ended but still so many moistening rivers
Flow through
Rushing rapids
Gang-la-mei-duo
petals
It is all one flower
The lotus sinks down
In its decline
Blue is no longer the hue of soulful interludes
For the yak's blood has groveled in blood of butchery
Blood is the final drunken flush
Of the blue sky
Remove yourself from the herd, no need for a marked forehead
There is my storm of knowledge where weeping comes
from I have
no need
Of anything
Line of snowy peaks like a mobile funeral approaching
a barren grave
No song
Can't sunlight touch the tiny hands trembling in darkness?
Yesterday?
Clouds heavy over the sea, the storm-tossed gull is heedless of return
Once more I shoulder my simple pack
The Lord left his children this final escape
Onward goes the horizon with no place to leave wandering traces
Gunsmoke obscures your window night gapes
Its huge mouth suspicious of muzzles
Do not squeeze the peak's far side, it has stood through ancient
inundations, it understands
The newest meaning of wandering
Don't raise a fist as if the earth gives a thumbs-up sign, wild for
spear-points of March on the march
This is not the bloody ground of Allah your winning army can roll over
Can you still see the village of a folktale, child?
Yes, too many disasters are inscribed in scriptures
Too many excuses to torment crawling ants
If a foot relishes trampling their narrow houses it means
None stroll at dusk and ponder the bells tolling vespers
Can you still hear desperate voices in a funeral, brother?
Won't this Amen transmit the repeated farewell
Of empty sky?
Whatever the news of you I would stop this moment
Bloodshed it not what I fear
Translated by Denis Mair
|
|