September 7, 2024 - “South Nothingness (Namo)” by Wedge Tai
Having no thought is the root; detachment from all forms is the body; persisting in no idea is the essence.
---The Sutra of Huineng
Only by clipping your wings, and squeezing
into hive-like pigeon-holes, can you prove
that you are an eagle.
Only by chopping off your feet, and cramming
yourself into a capsule car, can you demonstrate
that you are a cheetah.
You are a butterfly, that roams among
illusory flowers; or you are a flower,
that expects an illusory butterfly’s visit.
More often than not, you are a caterpillar
nibbling away the leaves under yourself,
until you have nowhere to stay.
All that you covet, is nothing
but bubbles of the seawater of desires
blown by the colossal mouth of capital.
You should be a cactus or a hedgehog,
that turns prajna into long spikes,
to prick the bubbles, and pierce capital’s lungs.
2. The Sutra of Huineng is a Buddhist classic on Zen by the Sixth Patriarch Huineng in the 7th-century China.
“South Nothingness (Namo)” is a poem from the author’s collection 2510, which we will be featured on Curlew Daily over the next 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.
