Those from sadness – Found Poem
On the other side of the ocean
She is singing in your room
The song:
Ringing
moon quietly plays a portrait
a report of a death in the foreign land
a person
a farewell polite.
Outside the house
Faces：
kneel down into soil
as illusory as Guanyin,
stretching, stretching
till everyone acquiesces to a moment of peace.
The street alternates between street and grave,
entwine, merge like
Forest.
She comes outside, smiling
saying he’s back
but there is another part
under the sky of west:
On this side of the ocean
He’s here
just dead.
I come to him ask:
What the hell are those
from sadness?
I’ve seen a tree like this before
Where was it?
So long ago that I’ve forgotten
Under skies where the clouds made sounds
The black horizon swelled and from it
grew a huge tree
sucked the life from the ground
and pulsing branches reached up
as if to grasp something
within an egg
the giant bird sleeping.
“What happened to the bird? Where is it?”
It’s still there now, still dreaming.
“Dreaming? What does the bird dream?”
What is in the egg?
You still cannot tell me?
Yirui Pan is a poet and translator from Nanchang, China. He will soon begin an MA in Literary Studies at the National University of Singapore. His work explores quiet distances, layered memory, and the dissonance between languages.
