Susan Solomon, Owl Arrival
It Did Not Matter Without Poetry
translated from the Taiwanese Mandarin
A young man rang me up late at night and said,
I’m going to be an arms dealer.
I remember how I let go of a cool flame in my hands.
My exit wounds caused by a beloved’s bullets
Were filled with dust.
I don’t know, I said over the phone.
I guess he couldn’t get much out of a skeptic like me.
Even if I reacted fanatically, he wouldn’t understand
My worry. I mean, don’t the bits of this
Ordinary world repeat themselves, but people
Still can’t come to grips with it?
A nightingale died in my arms.
A heathered trail could no longer hear
Another cough.
Did the young man finally seek
A word more splendid than splendid?
All poets gathered
In stone caves, on dreamlands, or at the lips of islands and islets,
Where their hell-bound season would begin and end.
They might bend in a Greek urn, as they proofread
Ostentatiously the lyrical justice, razor-
Sharp premonition and meta-sweetness
They wrote about.
Meanwhile, some John Smiths trudged
Past the shops, restaurants, and hospital one by somber one.
As their moodiness left them out in the cold, they put on
The uniform they just bought.
Their eyes hunt from a menu in hunger.
Their bodies, wrecked, were glazed
With fast-absorbing solace.
But none noticed a tsunami was ravaging close.
Did these matter at all?
We’re bighearted, infecting
Those around us with pain
as we’re strung on lust.
My most humble wish in the dark was nothing
But about…freedom and equality,
Or their contraries.
(Not) far away, the land tinctured in black gold
Spread its body out flat.
It put up with each authoritative hoe.
A news anchor reported that the fog
Was thick enough to muffle gunshots from the heart,
One that, again and again, accurately took down
(Non-existent) leaders.
It did not matter without poetry––
The antediluvian sunlight would soon deplete.
Someone casually heated the ocean, praying
For a heavenly demolition.
Whales started protests in invisible cities.
The tides, a dirge of the crooning Earth
Only for those who understood the flow.
Born in 1976 in Taiwan, SUN TZU-PING graduated from the Graduate Institute of Creative Writing and English Literature at National Dong Hwa University. He is currently an editor at the Liberty Times. Chinese titles by Sun include Knowing Shadows (essays), Sentimentalist (poetry), and Male Bodies (novel), among others.
NICHOLAS WONG is the author of Crevasse (Kaya Press, 2015), the winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and Besiege Me (Noemi Press, 2021). He is also the recipient of the Australian Book Review’s Peter Porter Poetry Prize. His translation has recently appeared in Ninth Letter, The Georgia Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Cincinnati Review, Poetry Northwest, and Black Warrior Review. IG: @citiesofsameness.