SHADOW IS BRIGHTER THAN LIGHT
Black kites hover around in the sky white seagulls fly low over the sea
Brandy raises a toast at Lan Kwai Fong for class action
Black skin yellow skin white skin
English French Japanese Korean Cantonese Mandarin
Victoria Harbour corners of the mouth smile
Pottinger Street bustle a group of filmmakers
Heroine in cool makeup performs
An intricate romantic comedy
At Sun Kwong Theatre in North Point Peking opera actors sing Kunqu opera
Lockhart Road Bar Street twist topless foreign women
Likewise foreign men’s hormones exceed alcohol concentration
Out of Central Office Building go delicate white collars with yellow skin
Shop names in 1881 Canton Road are all English logos
The only Chinese one is Puyi Optical Shop
It seems she fails to recognize her birthplace returning home from foreign countries
Snakes and butterflies often appear in her dreams
In a trance she only feels the life is poor white the moon is plump
Shadow is brighter than light dressing before bronze mirror made of wood
TO LOVE AN ORDINARY MAN THROUGH THE CROWD
Those who radiate brilliant light
Those who have super talent
Those who possess unmatched appearance
Those who worship stars with excess
Those who own houses full of silver and gold
Those who boast power and influence with high status
Those who get narrow mind
Those who hold poor taste
Those who harbor evil intent
Those who create illusory sense
I will round ordinary man through the huge crowd
An ordinary man illegible in the crowd
An ordinary man without dazzling
An ordinary man with only ordinary appearance
To love his ordinary quality ordinary open mind
Ordinary goodness ordinary genuineness ordinary neatness
To love an ordinary man
Through the huge crowd
Tranquilly in a tiny and tidy house
In a tiny city
With ordinary firewood rice oil sate sauce vinegar tea
Ordinarily rejoice ordinarily agonize
Ordinarily experience vicissitudes of human affairs
Ordinarily live simple lives
ROOT PLANTS
Love light dishes
Eat vegetable roots
Not picky eaters
Never spit rough parts
But carefully chew into finer pieces
As if to put fragrance
And fullness of the earth
Into every cell of bodies
Firmly I believe
From soil I come
Being one of them
KNEELING UNDER THE MOON
Dang Dang Dang...
The old clock in the living room strikes twelve
Puts her palms together devoutly
Kneeling under the moon
Are you shining on my mother, moon?
She cycles to carry food in the mountains
Where there are beasts and cliffs
Please take her out safely
She mimics the gesture of her grandmother’s worship of
Kneeling down towards the moon
Again and again
HOW SCARCE HAPPINESS IS!
Dusk rises and falls in light and shadow
Bats hanging upside down in the caves
Are new freckles of the earth
Which is enveloped by something vaster
What I dismantle is my heart
And head
Which no longer sigh for wrinkles of lift
Or feel guilty about sleepless night
In the world filled with insect holes we
Say how important happiness is!
In fact
How scarce it is!
ALL PAIN HAS PROPER COMFORT
Sore throat headache muscular soreness from head to foot
The nurse with colorful medicine
Says to you
Red for runny nose
Grey for cough
Blue for muscle pain
Pink for fever
White for stomachache
Well the doctor worries that you are virus-infected
Antibiotics also prescribed
Colorful candies alike
Spreading out over the palm of a middle-aged person
Each pain has
proper comfort
IMMORTALITY IN FORMALIN
In the Human anatomy class
The teacher asked students to touch a corpse’s heart
Students said the heart was cold
And had already stopped
The teacher said
When he made a will
To donate his body to the medical school
In the formalin solution
His heart
Would never stop beating
TIME
When I blinked
My hair grew gray
When I looked up
My teeth fell out
When I bent down
My back got hunched
When I turned back
You just disappeared
FOR A BLOOMING SUMMER
I can’t help picking some beautiful words
I can’t help scrubbing each word cleanly
The world is too enormous and crowded
Without any place to escape ,the cloud only floats in the darkness
A monster in me
Bending down to sniff the dew on the lotuses’ leaves
A bird flies from the nest
Taking all the words away what I have no chance to say
THERE IS A KID OF MINE IN THE PLAYGROUND
Leaves and flowers, falling off branches silently
Butterflies and dragonflies try reversing the gravity
They comfort every leaf and flower hastily
Small sparrows chirp “sisters” sadly
A park of Kowloon in Hong Kong
Another autumn is noted on the leaves
The sunshine is several graduations gentler than the summer’s
In the wrinkles of trees sings a ballad of buffalo boy
On the lakeside stands a colorful playground
Wafting sounds of screams, cries and laughs
I imagine, there would be a kid of mine in the playground
A kid I give birth to with autumn
He can run, jump, laugh and cry
As concrete as he could be
He plays on the swing
And swings a real world into my eyes
Such as leaves and flowers, falling off the branches silently
——————
Wu Yanqing, born in the 1980s,Bachelor of Chinese and Western Medicine,Master of Chinese in Education,Master of Drama in Education，senior international certified teacher of Chinese,once working as doctor,psychology teacher and editor of Literature Society,is now engaged in education.She is the editor of Poetry of Hong Kong Poets and CHINA Liu Pai Shi Kan.Hundreds of her poems,essays and novels have been published in the major newspapers and periodicals including Dagong Paper of Hong Kong,Hong Kong Writers,Hong Kong Poets,Urban Literature and Art,Poetry of Round Table,Liu Pai Shi Kan,Poetry of Olive Leaf,Grass House,Poetry,Selected Literature of Taiwan and Hong Kong,Poetry Appreciation,Heyuan Daily,Heyuan Evening,Huzhou Evening,Chinese Poets Impression,Influencers,Red Earth,etc.Her poems have been selected in various annual editions such as Daily Poem Calendar 2019,Misty Poetry Selection 2017,Chinese Soul Prose Poetry 2016 and Chinese Soul Prose Poetry 2017.She is also ajoint author of poetry anthology of Ten Poetry Couplers of Hong Kong.
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