Macchu Picchu—Bleak Encounter

(One)

It feels as if someone were treading on my chest

As I sit on your throne

Reading the story of a fallen kingdom

Silent stone is heavy like iron

The hammer once wielded in a wide arc

Comes down now across Cuzco's emptiness

Gold is undying

But it cannot ransom you back to life

The distraught king can be seen sitting in a painting

Facing Europe's helmets and murderous horses

Grief trickles from panpipes of Cuzco

You can't comprehend a civilization of barbarous invaders

The sun god collapsed after a single blow

As it turned out, your adversity had only begun

(Two)

That ethnic group on the backs of llamas was gentle

Gentle bitterness

Dripped in juice from coca leaves

Highland songs are azure like the sky

I spur a horse across a practice ground

How could an Oriental woman be so brash as to dream

Of holding you back from the brink of downfall?

(Three)

Your song went all the way to a mountaintop

Machu Picchu

Wine dribbles down the seams of your trousers

Landslides perform a grand opera on all sides

Sunlight and moonlight in turn sweep over great expanses

At night they dance—these stones that grew names

You held your revels facing ranged mountains

With your thousand consorts at hand

Machu Picchu!

Stones are bleak with blood that flowed here

Bells of Cuzco's churches have stopped ringing

Seen from a height above sunrise

The moon knows the heartache of sheep's hooves

I stroke your pain, like a witch who has lost restraint

My tears pour forth

(Four)

Now I can calmly face a snowfall

Snow comes flurrying down

Hiding the sword of a fallen kingdom

Untended weeds grow right up to the sky

Cuzco is located so close to the sun

A blizzard can easily block its throat

(Five)

By ruining a church, umm...No, a temple

One can ruin a whole highland, the heart's high terrain

One can ruin the fire from split rocks

Ruin the rarefied air

Eight-degree angles tell an undying tale [1]

Interior of stones, yin and yang in interlock

Bleak creation that ages but is not ruined by time

[1] Archaeologists have discovered that many structures at Machu Picchu are pitched at an 8 degree angle, giving the walls and doorways optimum protection against earthquakes.

(Six)

Seize fire from the tender part of your chest

From the neck of Andes Range

That silent cranium nurtured quite a few eagles

When the eagles moldered away

The lonely huddling of this place ended

Mysterious Urumbamba River

How did its churning passion arrive at a peak

Where peace held sway with festive dances?

A mountain range was a giant's face turned to the stars

Every roofbeam had its stone gnomon

And windows were in threes

Sun   moon   woman

Accept each heart that comes in pilgrimage

Machu Picchu

Give increased height to dust

You can no longer face the burning sun alone

Your soul suffers so many disruptions

Grows further and further from the sun

(Seven)

A child on an ancient Inca road, racing a train

Is a strong outgrowth of the Inca bloodline

Weather-beaten space, obdurate time

The horse of Neruda

The hammer of Hiram Bingham [1]

When up against stone

All else is transitory like sand

Windows in threes

Time   space   llama

[1] Hiram Bingham was an archaeologist from Yale University who made several expeditions to Machu Picchu from 1910 to 1917. His reports drew international attention to the Incan ruins there.

(Eight)

The Andean Range

Black locomotives, sun-blackened faces

Spotless white radiance surrounded by black jungle

A spotless white heart

Andes Mountains

You embedded a tumbling stream in a mountain gorge

Placed a rough, perpendicular mirror above it

Then for four hundred years

Concealed those torrential water sounds

Let them be forgotten by ranged peaks

The time is not yours to decide

Time brings all things to fruition

Then destroys all things

(Nine)

Pachakuti, last great king of the Incas

Foreseeing those who'd search through history's ashes

For mottlings of shame and glory on stones

Hid written secrets in a defile

Blood of a fallen kingdom

Was smeared on loaves of stone

Women were nurturers of this high terrain

And on Machu Picchu

They were offered up to a fictive sun

(Ten)

There is no salvation that truly arrives

Gold   cosmos   churches

Time   space   cosmos   

Sheep   women   angels

Machu Picchu

Seeing Cuzco's increasing prosperity

Fall into conventional patterns of global unity

You can only make up stories

To answer prayers of the faithful

Using silence of towering peaks

Using solitude and desolation and ruins

(Eleven)

Yes, open my wounds

Open the wounds of Inca kings

Open the wounds of Peru, of South America

The wounds of the world

Open up a skull's unrecorded slaughter

Open sobs of wind-driven dust on bare ground

Open up   a heart dripping blood

Open up   injuries of stones in the night!

Open up that stretch of oxygen-deprived land

And those oxygen-deprived seeds

Seeds without genetic modifications

Will grow slowly

Within the wounds

(Twelve)

There is no nirvana

In the last month of a year

During the northern hemisphere's harsh winter

You enter a thriving summer

Take this bleak encounter, use tightly woven bamboo

Use a needle to stitch it tightly

To fashion an eyelid

And in the blinking of my lashes

The world will open and close

On your weathered cheek   leave quivering fingerprints

Of my present lifetime

(2014.11.17  Los Angeles)

——————

Mei Er, formerly named Gao Shangmei, was born in Jiangsu and now lives in Beijing and London. Chairman of the China “Twelve back” International Poetry Festival, president of Taiwan's "Autumn Water" poetry magazine. She began to publish poems in 1986. She has written poems "The Weight of Sponge", "You and Me", "Behind the Twelve" and so on. Won the "Best Poetry Award for the 4th China Long Poetry Award", the "Top Ten Female Poets in Chinese Poetry Ranking", the "Poetry Creation Award" of the American Academy of Culture and Arts, the 57th China Taiwan Literature and Art Medal, and the 4th Eurasian The Gold Medal of Poetry Creation in the Literary Festival, the Outstanding Poet Award of the First Boao International Poetry Festival, the 2019 Chinese Poetry Spring Festival Gala. The Best Poet Award, the first "Genesis Modern Poetry Award", and was invited to participate in the 30th International Poetry Festival in Medellin, Colombia. Poems have been translated into English, Russian, Japanese, German, Mongolian, Persian, Ukrainian and other languages and published.

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