Getting Along: A Bilinguacultural PoemBy Yuan Changming
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In Chinese, 朋友，恋人，& 爱人 are all
12-stroked characters, just as their counter- Parts friend, couple & spouse are 6-lettered Words in the imperial vocabulary of English Though they are all underlined with human Love and loyalty, the former entails twice As much input or effort of the heart As the latter to maintain a disparately Similar humane relationship as a speech act That Which GlittersBy Yuan Changming
Is not just gold, but also the teeth chewing
The bitterness of life at twilight; the bones Excavated from a lost civilisation; the roof Tiles glazed with the rain of last night; & The rock standing firm in the gurgling stream; The broken mirror in the debris of history; & The disk hung like a scarecrow in the garden; The wings of a raven flying in the storm; & The coal close to a furnace; the forehead Of my late father in my dream; as well As the scales of a fish jumping out of water Against the starlight; the glacier protruding From an unknown peak in the Rocky Mountains; Or, the eye looking beyond the darkness of tonight Who I Am: A Philosophical PoemBy Yuan Changming
Looking up
To the darkish infinity of Outer space, I see How a star has been growing Only to die in holographic parallel With a cell within my body & come to know my protobeing & the cosmos as one & the same: just as I is The cosmos, so The cosmos am I Yuan Changming grew up in an isolated village, started to learn the English alphabet at age nineteen and published monographs on translation before leaving China. With a Canadian PhD in English, Changming currently edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan in Vancouver. Credits include eleven Pushcart nominations, nine chapbooks & awards, and publications in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17) and BestNewPoemsOnline, among 1789 others across 46 countries.
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