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.

送友人 A Farewell to a Friend

李白 Li Bai （701-762）

青山橫北郭, 白水繞東城。

With a blue line of mountains north of the wall, and east of the city a white curve of water,

此地一為別, 孤蓬萬裏征。

Here you must leave me and drift away, like a loosened water-plant hundreds of miles....

浮雲遊子意, 落日故人情。

I shall think of you in a floating cloud; so in the sunset think of me.

揮手自茲去, 蕭蕭班馬鳴。

We wave our hands to say good-bye, and my horse is neighing again and again.

Translation by Witter Bynner (1881 – 1968)

ANTIDOTES TO FEAR OF DEATH
by Rebecca Elson (1969 – 1999)

Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.

Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.

Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:

No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.

And sometime it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:

To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.

A Personal Note for May/June

On May 6, 2021, I left my hometown in China one last time, not sure when I would be able to return. A year later, covid, after its first appearance in the city of Wuhan in 2020, made a return to China in early March. Some of its biggest cities, including Shanghai and Beijing, adopted the strictest policy to keep the virus from spreading among its 1.4 billion people. Sitting in Astoria, New York, I feel traveling back to China simply a more daunting idea than February, 2021, when it felt like a magic when I successfully made my way back to my hometown, to be by my mother’s side. She was dying of multiple myeloma.

Is the hardest departing the kind you know is the last time you would see each other, flesh and warm? You look into each other’s eyes, knowing departing is inevitable, and unity will only return in a different form, metaphorically, perhaps. This time, you say good bye to each other, without making the next travel plan, nor new promises, nor “see you next time.” You just depart.

Perhaps Li Bai, and the poets in his time, know this kind of departing all too well. At a time when the fastest means of travel was by horses, and years would have to pass before a reunion, each departure is more likely to draw lines between life and death. They just wave their poetic hands and wait until the horses vanish in distance. They won’t say “see you next time”, not even dropping the slightest hint.

And only Li Bai, with his unique natural grace, so effortlessly sets such despair with the floating cloud in the sky and the falling sun at dusk. One feels instantly significant when connected with something as grand as the universe, and indifferent, as a tiny being that is the same as everything else born into this vast void. Oddly, there is comfort. 

That’s where I find the resemblance between Li Bai, the greatest Tang Dynasty poet in early 8th Century, and Rebecca Elson, a Canadian American astronomer and poet, who, died of cancer at the age of 39, has one slender poem collection, A Responsibility to Awe. They both studied the universe and told us its secrete -- that after departing, it is the universe that we all will return. There, we reunite with our ancestors and loved ones. Atomically speaking, aren’t the particles that we are all made of going back to the universe, ultimately?

Astoria, New York

May 22, 2022