Ma Yan
Translated from the Chinese by Stephen Nashef
Some people are taking a bus to Fragrant Mountain which climbs
a long road, the way a sailor boards a ship whose course has been set.
A jolting busful of people enjoying the squeeze as they imagine some feeling.
and endure a soft suffering, like assenting animals drawing a plough.
It is the kind of suffering that is worth getting drunk in, a floating
suffering, a suffering for which there is no need to cry out. It is a child
in a cradle, the rumbling land of the nation, it is an earthquake.
It is a moment of wind without scent, no different to anything
that happened before, passing between bowls filled with rice, it is
a new kind of rice, the dead bodies dredged up all at once from the paddies
from the North to the South. It is the warm, edgeless object itself, it is
the non-existent rift extending between unruly Brownian particles.
But this division should exist, the distinction that fantasy needs
to make the sentimental complain and kick at the ground.
But no gulf can help us conceal our bodies, which we hide
in the crowd, for we and they are the same. It could even be said,
this is the event in the mirror that shatters itself.


Image of Chinese text
from the book I NAME HIM ME / Ugly Duckling Presse
READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM
Share Share
Tweet Tweet
Forward Forward
Color headshot of Martin Espada
Martín Espada Knows About Banned Books

"Martín Espada, the recipient of the 2021 National Book Award for poetry whose past works were the targets of conservative outrage, is urging authors of recently banned books to forge on....Espada tackles the everyday lives of people struggling with poverty, migration, climate change and loneliness in his latest collection, Floaters: Poems."

via AXIOS
READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES
Support Poetry Daily

Purchase your books, whether or not you discovered them on Poetry Daily, at our virtual bookstore on Bookshop. Every book you buy helps to bring the best contemporary poetry to you every morning.
 
Amaud Jamaul Johnson's handwritten copy of "A Lovely Love"
What Sparks Poetry: 
Amaud Jamaul Johnson on Gwendolyn Brooks's "A Lovely Love"

"I was twenty and an undergraduate at Howard University, taking Dr. Jon Woodson’s Survey of African American Poetry. He was suspicious of labels and spent the first weeks of class arguing against his own course title. His first lecture began with a summary dismissal of Maya Angelou, who a year earlier was Bill Clinton’s Inaugural Poet. He would hand out poems with the authors’ names blacked out, and ask: “What makes this a Black poem, or is this good or bad?” We had to defend our answers. Our shortcomings were immediately evident. This is how I was introduced to Gwendolyn Brooks’s 'A Lovely Love.'"
READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
View in browser

You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com. 
If you would like to unsubscribe please click here.

© 2022 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030

Design by the Binding Agency