Wednesday 5 November 2014

5 Poems by Yuan Changming

Valueless:  The Myth of Fair Price

Everything, everybody
Used to
    And still may have
A value; only
Only each has depreciated
Into a price
That keeps fluctuating
        violently
Against no value


Civilian Profiling: the Serial Terminator

A Caucasian man
Strong-bodied
Relatively young
Fond of wearing blue jeans
Driving a big-powered car
Who looks clean, attractive
Especially to pretty young girls
But has just undergone
Some pressure recently

His next target will be
A female chick of Chinese origin

  
Darkness vs Light

In deed
You had the darkest
Moment of
Last night

But you are all
The sunshine there is
This morning


Ascendance

Never are those ants-like creatures
Crawling to joint it – under low bushes
Across trails, at cracks, where
It occasionally dwells. All the tiny
Minds go up through the words like
Dust rising above trees, as the wind
Keeps blowing, and the ladder reaches
Higher against the Babel Tower
Disciples across the whole world  
Gather to approach Menfucius
And Menfucus approaches Confucius
And Confucius approaches Laozi, who
Is still trying hard, harder than Socrates
To find Tao above yin and yang


Circle:  A Geometric Poem

Rolling down from primitive mountains
Were stones, fruits, berries, trunks, together
With other roughly round shapes
To lakes, rivers, ponds, and pools where
Rain drops make disks as regularly round
As the sun, the moon and stars, until
The first wheel began to rotate
Like our planet – that was
More than eighty centuries ago

Ever since we have been moving
Up and down, faster and faster
With all others running
Outside our closed curve

Bionote 

Yuan Changming,  8-time Pushcart nominee and author of Mindscaping (2014) and Landscaping (2013), grew up in rural China, started to learn English at 19, and published several monographs before leaving China.  With a PhD in English, Yuan currently tutors in Vancouver, and co-edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Qing Yuan. Since mid-2005, Changming's poetry has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry (2014, 12, 09), BestNewPoemsOnline, Threepenny Review and 939 other literary journals/anthologies across 30 countries.

No comments:

Post a Comment