Girl’s Face and Peach Flowers
In spring, leave door ajar, let wind come through gap
Sunlight gives the scholar first awakening of love’s a door
Peach blossom, brief encounter with spring
Bees and butterflies drawn to wherever my feet step
Peach blossom become token of girl seeking love
Waiting for flowers to blossom, declaration of Nirvana
Untouchable dreams flourish from tiny buds
Floating petals in gentle breezes
Three seasons wistfully waiting for flowers to bloom.
Laughter of children playing under fruit trees
Creating gentle rain of petals falling.
Rubbings
Rubbing fingers against bumps and depressions
On stone tablets, oracle bones, bronze vessels
Ink Yin Halo black, traversed, cross-sectional history
Traceability, one story comes to life.
Spinning to dance on paper, all in one
Running like moving fingertips
Reincarnation, in meditative way
Hard to soft, piece of rice paper has ups and downs.
Faces emerge from thin paper
One turn and truth is revealed
Tang-ga
At the Metropolitan Museum in foreign land
Tang-ga, past five hundred times looking back
Made in China, dazzling, shedding tears, heart moved.
Go through Tanggula Mountain to Potala Palace
An encyclopedia of Tibetan culture, codes from past of Tang Dynasty
Political economy, astronomical architecture, layer after layer
Thin oxygen making it hard to breathe, impossible to run
Lack of culture in the body can cause physical suffocation
History reincarnation of an encounter across the ocean
Bewitched the dazzled.
Galleries around Jokhang Temple
Light color, soul background, body heavy color
Pen nib gently touches outline of line after line
Shining light, the millennium I passed by.
Feng Yan is an English teacher & associate professor at Liaoning Vocational College of Light Industry. Her poems, essays, novels and translated poems have been published in Selected Poems, Poetry Monthly, China Economic and Social Forum, etc. She won the 3rd Chinese Contemporary Poets Award in 2019, and recently translated the anthologies Time Weighs Heavy and Seeds and Flowering Past.
