September 8, 2024 - “West Beauty” by Wedge Tai
A hundred years, is but a leap of a sparrow
among the trees. Layers and layers of time’s
covered your mound, just as the amorous frost
swallows a stubborn rock into her womb. But I am
a frozen lake, fearless of the reaping wind of age.
Rowing a cypress boat, in the middle of the river,
that boy with long locks, is the very one I adore.
Even death cannot change my love for him.
The home items still radiate your warmth
and your breath, as if you had never left.
Your freezing tenderness and your glowing
rigidity, are a primitive machine that takes me in,
and presses me repeatedly as pig iron.
Rowing a cypress boat, to the other side of the river,
that boy with long locks, is just the one I love.
Even death cannot separate us.
You said, I was a piece of ore from Venus,
too happy on earth to be homesick. Actually,
I am more like red coral in the ocean, while you
are a damselfish swimming about, who is
at times mesmerized by the sirenic jellyfish.
Oh my mother, good heavens! Why can’t you see?
Oh my mother, good heavens! Why don’t you agree?
Now, you’ve long become a bush of white coral,
lighting the darkness underground. But I,
as a grosbeak, am confined in the steel cage
of my own body, dreaming every day
about returning with you to the deep sea.
3. The title refers to the famous beauty called Xishi in the Spring and Autumn Period of China.
4. The italic allusion is taken from the ancient Chinese poetic classic The Book of Songs.
“West Beauty” 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.
