Leopard
Trs. by Fan Jinghua
In the 1970s, on the wall
behind our county co-op
counter hung a piece of
leopard pelt purchased
from a peasant. ——Note
Bring it on,
I turn the grapeshot from my
previous life to blossoms
over my body.
Iron rushes in the wind, and
behind me bit by bit the
village gets lost;
The breath of the treetops
decays on the green hills,
Diffusing at the speed of iron.
Dawn and dusk are seamed
together,
Human traces come between
and become
The powerless red despair in
my legacy.
I plant iron in the earth, and
let it sprout and grow,
As the village turns pale in
the tree shade, regretful.
The fist of my pelt takes hold
of the iron and runs,
The distance I can cover
determines the length of
the iron.
The faster I run, the slower
the iron,
The longer time the village
has for itself to decay.
I fish, with the line I draw with
the speed of the running
iron,
The dining table of the forest
is shrouded with the white
cloth of the sky,
While hungry birds sing. The
gold coins over my body
Are baiting the village into
flying.
Bring it on,
I have been glorified by the
blossoms of grapeshot
And made into the last flag, a
verb
Nailed to the wall.
—Excerpt from Gong Xuemin,
The Cafe Review, Fall,
(USA: XPress), 2021, p. (26).
Special guest editor of this
edition of Chinese poetry:
Sophia Kidd.
Chen Anjian,
Transport Teahouse Series,
Oil on Canvas, 34.5 cm × 41.5 cm,
2019. Image provided by artist and
Liao Liao Arts Dissemination Institute.
Tibetan Antelope
Trs. by Fan Jinghua
Desperate horns, in running,
leave scrapes
All over the bloated skin of
the sky.
I am not to blame, as lead
bullets have taken down
the sky of my family,
And now the sky is small like
a snowflake.
I have to run fast to pull this
piece of snowflake into a
flag,
A white flag, to cover
The colorful carcasses
exposed in the TV news.
The hair is thinning on my fur
as the temperature rises,
And my heart cools only when
I step upward.
My horns become lonely, too
fragile to stay stable in the
wind,
As one by one my rivals of the
same blood have been
gunned down.
My lungs are infected by the
asthma of off-roaders,
And when I shiver
The grasslands become the
scars I cough up and spit
to the earth.
My name stays in the heart
Of people who no longer write
with hands and it dies with
each stroke;
My name will be increasingly
simplified until the entire
plateau is put in pens.
I can only make use of the thin
air,
And thin down my name and
put it in the textbook
As a vocabulary for the
traversing trains.
I can only use shallow grasses
to remind the bullet
I am a species of running
herbivore,
Like the running of a bullet,
But the bullet won’t listen.
It thirsts for blood, for me
and all the creatures.
Inevitably, it will thirst for
men who invented it.
—Excerpt from Gong Xuemin,
The Cafe Review, Fall,
(USA: XPress), 2021, p. (27).
Special guest editor of this
edition of Chinese poetry:
Sophia Kidd.
To read more poems, please check out
Gong Xuemin
A native to Jiuzhaigou, Sichuan, Gong Xuemin started writing poems in 1987, and has published several books of poetry, including long poem The Long March and an annotated edition of the Tang-dynasty poet Li Shangyin. Gong is the editor-in-chief of the poetry magazine Stars and resides in Chengdu, China.
Scan this code,
join the Yanlu community.
Original content, all rights reserved
If you need to reprint, please contact
Contact email:
info@yanluartsandculture.com
Recent Comments