Poems by Wang Guilin
Translated by Shi Wenjun, Lu Yang and Zhang Lujie
Polished by Bei Ta
Night Descends in a Moment
(Dedicated to Salvatore Quasimodo)
“In a moment, the night descends”
The chirping of crickets rises on the deck and spreads
As if I am not floating on the dark sea
But being in the grass of my hometown
I think of you again with warmth flowing all over my body
From Bohai Bay to the Mediterranean, from Syracuse
To Santorini, four days are like forty years
Continuously you possess my heart, like the sea
Surrounding the island. That boy who often tucked
Your poetry in his backpack, is now hoary-haired.
My history is like a night watchman.
Shivering yet stoical, lighting a candle in the cold
Again and again, I tell the truth in my words
In “the place where the dead stand with their eyes open”
I strive to unfold a sorrowful smile
The ocean rocks with eternal sorrow, a kind of existence
Unable to change. I am still a wanderer, but
have submitted to fate, learning to accept it
Even if bent down, I no longer lament:
“The rippling sea is but an illusion”
Seagull
How to begin this poem? As the cruise ship
Sailed south from the Apennine Peninsula,
Its massive turbines, mixers of indigo sea,
Have plowed a trench of whirlpools,
Like a deep, and long wound of the ocean.
From this wound, a flock of seagulls emerged and ascended,
Bursting into songs and dances low in the sky.
I marveled at so many grave verses
Created by a delicate hand, like lithe clouds
Subsiding among stones and earth.
The earth was vast as it was, and so was the sea.
The thirteen-thousand-ton colossus, carrying thousands of people
And traveling across the vast ocean,
Remained lonely. Only the distinguishable seagull
Served as the messenger of land, conveying joy and sorrow,
Yet was unaware of this vocation and its destiny, as we
Are unaware of ours. We ourselves are our limitations and burdens;
The seagull, its own aircraft,
And “incarnation bliss”.
It flew around the cruise ship, between the sky and the sea,
Portraying a soft landscape—the rhetoric of flight.
For a moment, it kept pace with the cruise ship,
Wings outstretched, not tossing with the waves but rising and falling
With the fluctuation of my mood. In the instant I gazed,
It was nearly still, as if the stillness of time.
... Seated inside the cabin, I stopped writing a poem for the time being
To contemplate a person, a seagull, and a cruise ship,
All caught in a fleeting rest upon the strings of time, while the cries in my ears
Kept spurring the billows and beating the gongs and drums in my heart:
The call of one bird might be understood by another
Different bird, yet a poem or a person’s words
Are hard for others to interpret or tell with precision.
Even if belonging to ... the same species, the same clan,
They may still drown in heaps of words and suspicious
Undercurrents—turbid, cold, and dark...
September 25, 2023, Greece
Midday Lifeboat
The noon descended and divided the sleepless day.
The inn at the rural-urban continuum connected noise and loneliness.
The leisurely time is really boring and long.
I sat alone on the balcony sticking out of the building---
A lifeboat was suspended on the cruise ship.
Outside of the fences, pine cones all over the tree
Were covered by needles, as calm as black grenades.
“Cradling in the dark cradle without any name”.
The crow was cruising the single-log bridge. The rotating obsidian
Was waiting for the bombing moment in the wind.
In the distance there is the grass tent with green trees forming a separating wall.
A car ran by, twinkling and then disappearing.
Like a blink of time. Where has it gone?
Did that man and those men have the same hesitation
As mine when they were hurrying off?
One moment, the time was stagnating on gaze and meditation.
Observation and description appeared to be impotent and pale.
I drove the lifeboat, trying to draw the image that the water of time
Overflowed the tower of existence while I myself---a model?
Smeared and deformed randomly on the turbulent canvas.
Yes, it’s not me or you but the time that is modifying
and correcting everything. The fragile fulcrum of the noon of life
cannot stand the beating wind and battering waves. I closed my eyes:
The sound of motorcycles, the twitter of birds and the buzz of the outer units of air conditioners
Are circling and reverberating over the sea with boiling blue air
2023，9，30，Lisbon
Bio of the Author:
Wang Guilin is a member of Chinese Writers Association and Vice Chairman of Boao International Poetry Festival. He has won the first Seoul International Poetry Prize, the Fourth China Long Poetry Prize, the second Boao International Poetry Prize, the fifth Kachu Warren Poetry Prize, and the sixth Dahe Poetry Biennial Prize.
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