September 10, 2024 - “Centre of the Ring” by Wedge Tai
“This” and “that” having no antitheses is the pivot of Tao.
When the pivot is placed in the centre of the ring, one can deal with infinite changes.
---Chuang Tsu
A bottomless vortex, at the same time
a spinning top lashed incessantly by man’s desires,
whirls faster and faster, into the dark emptiness.
And you, are a grain of sand in the current.
The axis of the vortex is a moonbeam, sprinkled
over the snow-covered plateau, on which lives
no human, except a few pines holding their cones,
and the snow, loitering on the wind to and fro.
The hormone of capital permeates, boosting
straggly twigs from your heart. You must, as a tree,
cut them off to keep your trunk straight upward,
until your head is laden with myriad stars.
Then please come to the ring centre, and tower
as the Tide Control Pillar. In a blink,
what circles around you is no more the vortex,
but the Milky Way pulled off from the sky’s waist.
5. According to Journey to the West, the Tide Control Pillar is a tall thick metal rod that gods placed in the sea to control the tides, but it was later converted by the Monkey King into his powerful weapon.
“Centre of the Ring” is a poem from the author’s collection 2510, which has been featured on Curlew Daily over the last week.
Wedge Tai is a Chinese underground poet living in Beijing. Born in the 1980s and currently working as an English teacher, he writes poems in Chinese and in English that reflect dire political realities and the resistance thereto in the communist regime, and thus hardly gets published in mainstream press. He is the author of the self-printed collection, Disgrace Disclaimer.
