Wang Jianzhao
(China)
Crow in the Moonlight
This building is more confined than a coffin
A half step blunder
I’ll go from the corridor of life into the square of death
A Sybil is fleering in silent flowers
The eyes are asleep but the heart is awake
I am writing just like
A crow in the moonlight
The beak knocks a blank sheet
Ominous tail flits across the pied walls
A kissing gate is open
To let imagination’s flesh come in and out freely
The teeth have gone while the tongue is still there
Grandfather’s ghost told me in a low voice
The charming game about the tomb and
A lifelong combat between teeth and tongue
Suppleness encroaches on hardness
The paper before me
Illustrates a great patch of secret blankness
The befalling of a word
Proclaims a nameless miracle
I know I would grow old and die
As a died crow
I cannot smell the fragrance of rosebush
Falling feathers are the disorderly signs
The building collapsed at the moment of morning sunlight
Butterfly in the legend doesn’t appear
I do not turn a hair in writing
As if everything comes from my plot
A feather is inserted obliquely in the place without moonlight
Feb 12, 1997
Snowflakes Are Rotting at Night
The sound of wind engulfs me who has already been assimilated in the north
Withered leaves are driven from pillar to post which are just like defeated soldiers
Together with solitary lamp I am reading the posthumous works of Camoens
Mysterious ancient Portuguese is just like a sealed book
I stretch out my Chinese fingers
To touch the beard of poetry
Loneliness is extraordinary hard like the harden soil
The hardship of existence has infiltrated into language
I give up the game of collocation
And miss the beauty I met in the day
Conjecturing the implication of urbane comportment
Self-revealing undoubtedly is an imprudent adventure
It may be the signpost of love or the tombstone of friendship
Which god cannot judge rashly
I begin to taste the sweetness of desolation in silence
Ache without wound gives people the masochistic pleasure
However, snowflakes are rotting at night
Infamous darkness is engulfing the ultimate whiteness
O beauty is a kind of lethal toxin,
Penetrating into one’s heart more deeply than the upas curare wood
Nov 30, 1997
Door
Room 401, Unit 7,
Near left, wood and iron
Are often neglected by vigilant eyeballs
Immobile frame is like
A quadrate bridge arch
The emptiness all over the world flows
Things and people: it is said that matter is indestructible,
Then, what can a person lose?
Transformation is a cruel game:
…….in, out….
Out, in
……in, out……
The fourth floor’s side sits opposite to the staircase,
Like the crossroad of Robert Frost
It lines out the insidious cross
The angels flutter their wings, making silvery
Rattling sound, the devils put on colored masks,
Swirling and exchanging dancing partners, striving for
My wavering will……
Halting, common fissure leaks mysterious light
At the staircase’s confined corner.
So the good-hearted elderly begin to retrospect
The origin of flesh and
help the depraved guess the destination of soul.
Door reminds the being of lead grey
And the necessity of a lock
And the possibility of a copper key.
The Hasty falling sun
Scribble on the variegated rust
The comparatively concrete threshold
Stumbles my careful abstract.
How much spirit can a poem hold?
Our conscious beauty is incessantly
Polishing and learning the rudimental art of death,
Metamorphosis: simple truth
Revives; grid of characters
Opens a small door one after another again.
Nov 25, 2004
Who is playing Bach
Dusk, one part of globe
Is growing dim,
The moon is rising
With half face,
The black shadow is reproducing in moonlight.
Crowded, shadows push and shovel one another
Pitch-black and hollow.
One sets off which is like
An old political brochure
Turns over to the back cover at last……
One sets off,
The eyes are dry,
The white hair covers the wrinkles and deeply brands
The regrets on the forehead,
The heart has been embarrassedly pressed between
The aperture of truth and falsehood,
And fallen into promised
Immortal fire due to haggardness.
It becomes silence among uproar.
One sets off alone
And becomes a wisp of light smoke
Above embers……
At this moment, faddish pop singers
Imitate talkative parrot,
Rolling their tongues in the loudspeaker of new century.
His voice is just like broken gong
Shouting himself blue in the face, painstakingly
Coercing the sobs of canal.
The north wind drives one hundred gigantic beasts
Walking in the sky
Lamenting and roaring……
The land on both sides of the canal are still silent
As if it is fighting with the shadow
About their individual silence.
Stone, but stone
Scrupulously abides by the duty of a peasant,
There are no flowers,
So I pick a bunch of wild grass to say goodbye,
That is the last pure green which comes from
The faint colored vase.
Empty and black
Is like twin brothers,
They walk into the gateway of midnight together,
Listen: who is playing Bach—-
In the depth of the building?
January 30, 2005
How the leaves lacerate wind
The snow in the fable delays
Again and again,
A cup of coffee on the table last year
Cools in this year’s scale.
My neighbor’s firecrackers imitate customary spring thunder,
And bomb the bald trunk in the yard,
And create hollow boisterous,
And fruitlessly block the cold snap to move towards south.
Wind sucks winter’s sunshine
And crosses the black sweatshirt,
And irrigates every small lacuna,
A drop of water jumps out of the balcony and tries to break
The silence at the dawn, its shout
Solidifies ice block in time’s Adam’s apple.
Solitary tree is outnumbered and let the leaves
Drain the green blood away without stopping,
The leaves are lacerated in the howl of wolf’s wind,
It eddies tragically and splashes down more deftly than butterfly,
The last leaf at the tree top is like
Lonely sigh—fiercely lacerating
The wind, this faintly discernible existence…..
February 4, 2006
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BIO
Wang Jianzhao was born in Huzhou, Zhejiang province in Oct, 1963. He is professor at Foreign Literature Institute, Beijing Foreign Studies University. He is the author of Literature Exchange between China and Russia, Chinese Modern Poetry in the 20th Century, Biography of Akhmatova, Poetry’s Raven Age and translator of Selected Poems in Russian Silver Times, The Destiny of Russia, Selected Lyrical Poems of Blok, Selected Poems of Poplavsky, Selected Russian Exile Poems, Selected Lyrical Poems of Pushkin, The Complete Poems of Mandelstam, An Anthology of Tsvetayeva and Selected Poems of Akhmatova. He writes poems in his spare time, and his poems were published on People’s Literature, Poetry Monthly, October, Poetry of Jiang’nan, Star Poetry Journal, Master and Mountain Flower. His poems were included in dozens of poetry anthologies, collections and annual poetry selections.