September 5, 2024 - “North Sea” by Wedge Tai
The traditional illumines the modern;
the past projects the future.
---Epigraph
Three-meter-thick ice lies under your feet, just as
desires compressed in your heart. North wind is
a scalpel, that removes your flesh from the bones.
The arctic fox, like a paper ball randomly discarded,
rolls on the snow. A seal sticks its head
out of an ice hole, and is pinned by the teeth
of a long-waiting polar bear. A hot red hibiscus
immediately blossoms on the niveous plain of ice.
In North Sea lives a fish, which is called Kun.
Kun’s body extends thousands of miles.1
You exit the Experience Hall, shed your down coat
and creep into your shorts. Boundless seawater
agitates your desolate eyeballs. Where the red
hibiscus once flourished, naked crowds lie
in the sun, air-drying their moldy lusts.
Great liners water wonderlands skyscraping hotels,
like tumours bulging out of the body,
waver in the warm breeze with slopes of poppies.
Turning into a bird, Kun becomes Peng,
whose back measures thousands of miles.
It rages and soars, with wings as clouds masking the sky.
The italic quotations come from the beginning chapter of the ancient Chinese philosophical classic Chuang Tsu.
“North Sea” 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.
