by Shenzhan/申展
Time goes by in a strange way after the beginning of 2020. These years, I find myself looking for something to get lost into, desperately. And I rediscover the power of written languages through poetry.
And here are my selections and notes.
Tulip in the Bryant Park, New York City, April 16, 2022
春曉 Spring Morning
By 孟浩然 Meng Haoran（689 – 740）
春眠不覺曉，Spring naps, unconscious of the dawn.
處處聞啼鳥。Everywhere, birdsong.
夜來風雨聲，Night sounds, wind, and rain.
花落知多少。How many petals, fallen?
Originally translated in French by Francois Cheng (1929 - )
BLOOM
By Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886)
Bloom – is Result – to meet a Flower
And casually glance
Would cause one scarcely to suspect
The minor Circumstance
Assisting in the Bright Affair
So intricately done
Then offered as a Butterfly
To the Meridian –
To pack the Bud – oppose the Worm –
Obtain its right of Dew –
Adjust the Heat – elude the Wind –
Escape the prowling Bee
Great Nature not to disappoint
Awaiting Her that Day –
To be a Flower, is profound
Responsibility –
A Personal Note for March and April, 2022
What poem could be more appropriate for spring than this quatrain by Meng Haoran, the great Tang poet, friend of Wang Wei, admired by Li Bai? Refreshing, innocent, exquisitely simple yet natural, in image and sound, this poem fits in the first-grade textbook in China and deserves the appreciation of the most sophisticated heart.
March and April are the months for contemplating the spring, yet in the year of 2022, I am also researching nuclear shelters in New York City and found this:
By 1963, there were 17,448 buildings identified by the Army Corps of Engineers with shelter spaces that could accommodate a total of 11,703,090 New Yorkers. These shelter spaces, typically windowless and in the middle of a building, or basement, also called “FALLOUT SHELTERS”, were built during the cold war to provide shelter in the event of a nuclear attack. In 2017, these buildings with the outdated “fallout” signs were mentioned as “fun facts” about New York City on a website called “untapped new york.”
At four o’clock in the afternoon on March 6, 2022, I was on the subway from downtown Manhattan to 42nd street, amazed and disturbed at the same time that now I knew this much about the fallout shelters in the city. It’s the 11th day since Russia invaded Ukraine and the talk about a nuclear attack suddenly became more than just an empty threat. Friends started chatting when would be the best time to move out of the city (again!), or at least prepare an emergency kit including water, snacks, a flashlight, passport and a phone charger. I also got a light backpack carrier for my cat Xiaomi.
It is the third spring since the pandemic started in 2020. I want so much to feel an innocent spring, peaceful with lives sprouting, blooming and being born, perhaps with only a touch of melancholy as in Spring Morning. I just want to wake up to a spring morning pregnant with rain, semiconsciously in between a dream and the reality. The sound of the wind and rain during the night may be still lingering. But is that real or in a dream? The birds - I can’t decide whether I shall be annoyed at them or welcome their morning chirps – those frivolous beings, to what extend are they responsible for bringing down the flowers?
And the flowers. In the months of this March and April, they are blooming, like every spring. In New York, they start to decorate the trees in the streets, parks, outside of the buildings. The nature, with all the burdens and tragedies, still doesn’t disappoint us, and other beings, to bring flowers back to the season.
But we humans fail to deliver an innocent spring. Every morning, I wake up to news that bodies are found left in devastated cities of Ukraine after ruthless attacks by the Russian army; that residents in Shanghai, the richest city in China with a population of 25 million, are crying out as facing unusual anxiety, stress, and deaths since its shut down on March 28 due to the Chinese government’s zero tolerance policy of Covid19; that a 62-year-old man opened fire randomly on a crowded N train in New York during morning peak hours, leaving 30 people wounded, blood shed on the platform of 36 Avenue in Brooklyn, and horror to millions who have no choice but continue riding the subways the next day……perhaps exactly because of these particular failures this spring, one may understand the weight of the word, responsibility, for conditions to keep a simple flower bloom, to live a simple life without fear of imminent death, and to read Spring Morning as a poem simply about birds and flowers, not thinking of lives lost in this spring when picturing the falling petals.
April 15, 2022
Astoria, New York