Reflection

      

By Yuan Changming

Equanimity   Hold the sun firmly Right above your inner landscape And there will be no shadow Shaking around   Let alone darkness That may engulf your selfhood Inside out   Unless it shakes itself with a wind Like a young tree, at the noon time   Reflection   Pick up the mirror Lost in your bog of consciousness   Cleans it really well With your inner fingers   And you will see through All faces and facets   Until you attain a clear vision Of your original selfhood   Your entire universe   Plenum   The other day I was thinking about the Immortality of God, Nature and Man’s Artifact (like Buddha’s teachings, and Newton’s discovery of gravity) when I noticed another apple being eaten By a lost child, the apple that was dropped Onto the pavement from a broken bag The one that was to inspire the eater’s Playmate to eventually make a robot Able to change the direction of our Mother earth’s movement, and even The way the human mind works, yes The same old rotten apple that reminds of The stinking corpse of a poor guy Which led a prince to become Buddha Once upon a long long time ago A Rented Place Is No Home to Your Soul   Everyone has an innerself that actually needs No housing, be it a well-located apartment Or a luxurious mansion, for which you have To toil and moil to pay off the mortgage And constantly to paint, to furnish, or to Renovate it as you would do for your outerself   But it does require you to design and construct A dwelling somewhere or anywhere, on a treetop Beside a streamlet, under a boulder, or beyond The horizon, where you can ease your entire inner Being into anything or nothing, where you can Uplift your own spirit and your farthest relative As if in a sociological quantum entanglement Shortcut to Happiness   You never have to die To go to heaven Nor do you need to rely On any religious rituals   All you should do Is just to climb Into the wicket of An inner balloon; then   Light the burner Drop off the ballast weights One after another As you rise, keep rising   Until you reach high High into a time spot Where you become the universe And the universe becomes you Self-Dating   Ever since you had to make money At the cost of your health and Character, you have always avoided Looking at yourself in a mirror Because you feel too ashamed Too disgusted to meet yourself Face to face again, where you could find Neither comfort nor contentment But ugliness bubbling in every Cauldron-like cell of yours   Now for the first time I am gathering All my courage to date my true self As I say aloud to myself in the mirror ‘I love you,’ I see all kinds of ups And downs zooming in my wrinkles, and Cannot help crying like a re-found child   Do you remember the many pains and Hardships you have gone through With this face? Do you see through this face The sacred secret of Greater Love? Wind-Hater   You don’t know why you always Hate the wind, but you can never forget How all the topsoil was blown off In the big bowl, how the passenger Train derailed, the ship toppled The cloud dispersed The stream distorted The petal broken The rock weathered The life dried The whole country agitated The conception aborted… As you come to see it as nothing less Than the evil spirit of disturbance An invisible seasonal spectre That keeps drifting around Between heaven and hell   Bio:     Yuan Changming edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan. Credits include 15 chapbooks, 12 Pushcart nominations for poetry and 2 for fiction besides appearances in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17), BestNewPoemsOnline and 2109 other publications across 51 countries. A poetry judge for Canada's 44th national magazine awards, Yuan began writing fiction in 2022; with his debut novel Detaching recently released at https://www.amazon.com/Detaching-Yuan-Changming/dp/B0DCNN474N, and his duology Mabakoola: Paradise Regained forthcoming in 2025.   -y at poetrypacific.blogspot.ca