Selected Poems of Jing Wa

A Tribute To Names On  Schindler's List

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

I Alone Know the Yak's Weeping

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

Don"T Let Gunsmoke Obscure Your Eyes

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

Last updated: February 20, 2005