collecting firewood in the field
as the afternoon sun hits my throat it takes on the quality of a melody:
solitude is sufficient as long as you live well. i remove my dirty shoes
and find myself falling thoroughly in love with how small my feet are
they've walked tens of thousands of miles and they're still the same
diminutive size, they've withstood day after day of inclement weather
i should have hardened and hidden my heart in the mud decades ago
thrown out the banality of carnality to leave a clean corpse with fine bones
i could not care one whit less about suffusing my spirit with nobility
the wheat in the paddy field is sprouting marvelously well
a bright red crane flits from tree to ground, ground to tree
i love you
would i really go so far as to call this a life?
every day i draw water from the well, put meals on the table, remember to take my medication.
when the sun is high up in the sky i steep myself in its light like fruit peel or tea leaves in hot
water: jasmine, rose, lemon, chrysanthemum. the sun and tea pull ne back towards springtime,
so each day i am able to hold back the frost in my heart as i sit
in a clean yard, reading your poems. feelings between people are as formless as darting
shadows cast by the flight of a started sparrow. there's no way i'd get my intestines in a twist
and chop up my innards just to lay them bare before you, look, if i mailed you a book, it wouldn't
be poetry.
i'd give you a book about plants.
on farming. teaching you how to differentiate between rice and weeds.
telling you about the lobe weed that couldn't stop quaking like a leaf one fine
spring morning
Yu Xiuhua, born in Hengdian, Hubei Province, China, is a poet from an
impoverished rural background who was born with cerebral palsy. Yu
began writing poetry in 1998. Her first poetry collection Moonlight
Falls On My Left Palm was published at Guangxi Normal University Press.
