January 2021

Monthly Archive

poem24 Jan 2021 07:44 pm

The Middle Kingdom

Empress Dowager Cixi of China, by a court painter, mid 1800s

Mary Soon Lee

At the center of all things,
a fountain in a garden.

Five yards from the center,
beneath a willow tree,
Ling Hua, Empress of China,
sat cross-legged
listening to the water
chattering to itself
in the hour after dawn,
the hour of consecration.

Her left knee ached.
She wished for her youth, long gone;
wished for a cup of green tea;
wished she could sail
right round the Earth's rim,
to see, as the great navigators had,
the line where ocean became sky.

A sparrow hopped onto the stone wall
of the fountain, bent down,
splashed busily.

Ling Hua, Empress of China,
watched the sparrow
while she sat beneath the tree,
five yards from the center of all things
(according to the astronomers' measurements),
that small separation a token
of her own imperfection.

For the stars and the sun and the moon
swept each in their perfect courses
around Earth's great disc,
but all who were born of women
were fallible.

Three hundred and eighty-two years
since China proved that it centered
not merely the Earth,
but the Universe.

Ling Hua bowed her head,
promised to safeguard China
from the least sparrow
to the oldest man.

Her knee ached as the stars spun round her.
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poem10 Jan 2021 07:02 pm

Feeding the Dead

By Albert Anker – Schweizerisches Institut für Kunstwissenschaft, SIK-ISEA inventory number 93320, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70014557

Deborah L. Davitt


I never thought of bread
as a living thing, but it is,
a colony of yeast bacteria
given living space and food
in a matrix of earth-given grain,
sea-born salt, and sky-born water;
they exhale their own breath
to make their city rise,
and we freeze them in place
with fiery oven heat.
 
Little wonder then,
that the Romans brought bread
and wine for libation
to the graves of their ancestors,
and sent the living food
down feeding tubes
to the bones and ashes
to appease the hungry ghosts;
 
little wonder, too,
that on Dia de la Muerte,
people for whom that language
hangs richly on their tongues
set out living bread for the dead,
marked with bones,
or Chimalma’s tears.
 
Maybe the ghosts can sniff out
the life in it, the bacteria
still struggling to survive
their own cremation,
entombed in the rigid shape
of their own mobile grave;
maybe they have to respect
the struggle to endure,
so like their own;
maybe, like the living,
they just like the smell
of hot, buttered bread,
fresh from the oven,
and cling to the heels
as we bring the last pieces
to our churning mouths.
 
Maybe they slide lusciously
down into our gullets,
ingested with the bread
and perhaps the wine
that we pour into glasses
instead of on the grass;
maybe they become a part of us,
and leave the graveside
nestled in our hearts and bowels,
instead of lingering
to stare at futile plastic roses
left to fade in the sun.
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