Night

      

By Yuan Changming

Midsummer Night   With my third eye, I often see The stars glistening like pearls Deeply lost in the sea of skies Skylight at Midnight   Not really the rain Tapping it aloud Like sparrows’ beaks But all the stars From the outer space Splashing down Into a Bai Juyi’s Plate for the dancing Pearls that I am Trying hard to catch And embed within This foreign stanza Zenning at Night      In the depth of darkness Sit straight In the full lotus position With your palms facing upwards & you will receive Not only photons from beyond The Milk Way But messages coded With human love, turning your whole being Into a Buddha in Samadhi      While all lost  Souls keep fluttering around like tree leaves Tender in Between: for Qi Hong   As night Falls Can day Catch it From the other Side of This world?   Meanwhile   The broken heart Is being Caressed by All the fingers Of starlight As tender as Illuminating When? In the Starry Night? Did My Life Started?   The instant? an infinitesimal sperm from my father? Penetrated into my mother’s egg? on a dark ? night   The second? my little head ? was pushed and pulled Right? Out of my mother’s teenager? womb?   Or the minute? I hit a brick? broke my forehead And thus got my first scar? (memory?)   With? no awareness of any earlier? childhood When? or where? did my life? begin in the red centre? On the Stage: After Shakespeare   Yesterday, yesterday, and yester- Day has gone with the west wind One after another to the starry night Set tight against history; each   Present moment is blatantly spot- Lightning the deformed soul Down, down the heavy curtain! Death is a zombie starkly zooming   In the back ground of every heart: We each believe our selves to be The hero on our own stage Though we turn out no more than   An extra happening to appear By mistake in a stranger’s comedy  Who I Am: a Biocomic-Philosophical Poem     Looking up to The darkish infinity of The outer space, I see How a little star has been growing Only to die, in (holographic) parallel With a cell within my nightly body   & come to know my protobeing & the cosmos as one & the same: just as I is   The cosmos, so The cosmos am I Their Starless Nights   Beyond her insomnia, a familiar Face was looming in their study   Have nothing better to do, he reasoned Sipping from a tall glass       While a lost dog was stalking around The house, sniffing at a meowing shadow   & pissing every once in a while To mark its inner dog-matic territory   Whose dog? Was it really a dog? How Come she felt it sneaking like a cat   Its tongue was so long Long enough to reach her own heart Or the heart of his glass, even longer Than to keep away the devilish virus   Yuan Changming grew up in an isolated village, started to learn the English alphabet in Shanghai at age 19 and published monoragpohs on translation before leaving China. With a Canadian PhD in English, Yuan edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan in Vancouver. Credits include 12 Pushcart nominations for poetry and 2 for fiction as well as 16 chapbooks and appearances in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17), among 2,019 others across 49 countries. A poetry judge for Canada's 44th National Magazine Awards, Yuan began to write and publish fiction in 2022, with his first (hybrid) novel Bamakoola: Paradise Regained forthcoming in 2025.