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Koon Woon
Page 2 Two Persimmons Side by Side
Green was the lily pad on which sat the
frog,
and crimson was the light through an
orange sky…
Things will be all right, this night and
other nights.
I am not the most gifted, nor am I the
most favored;
yet I too want to flee into your arms
enamored.
I have a twin in the metropolis, high in
a tower,
Half-buried in the chatter of
calculating machines –
he never looks back at the village
where his brother re-digs another ditch
and sighs at his long slender fingers
that might have caressed a violin…
Somewhere in the world, two
Persimmons sit side by side on a shelf,
Ripening quietly through quiet days.
On some day of some month, all guitars
will weep,
and the persimmons’ red hues will deepen
and deepen.
For every brother there is a brother,
and for every persimmon there’s another
persimmon,
but for every boy is there a girl?
And for every girl is there a promised
world?
No one knows except the crimson sky
and the red, moist persimmons…
(Appeared first in The Burden of Sanity
and Other Poems, Chrysanthemum
Publications 2004, and then in Water
Chasing Water, Kaya Press, 2013)
Lychee
When a woman refuses your gifts,
She’s a woman in the next tenement room,
And she knows you have nothing
Nor ever had anything to give her.
And you may be an emperor,
But the palace guards don’t obey you,
And is this place a palace or a prison?
On her way to the communal toilet, she
looks past you,
Her eyes vacant, registering nothing,
and you ask,
“Is there a man on her mind? Or a job?
Or a woman?”
And she is clothed in a coarse red
shirt,
The one you gave her that once
Belonged to your brother, the lawyer –
She looks like the juicy meat of a
lychee in winter,
Fetched by fast chariots from a far-away
province.
She walks, never touching,
Though you’ve lived for so many years in
adjacent rooms,
And water, when running in one room, can
be heard in the other.
Her hair blower hums a forlorn tune
against
The soft murmurs of a city in sleep, in
fornication.
The blower hums,
“I shall never marry; I shall never
marry…”
(Appeared first in The Burden of Sanity
and Other Poems, Chrysanthemum
Publications 2004, and then in Water
Chasing Water, Kaya Press, 2013)
Coming Are the Days…
Perfect weather in the onset of autumn
with maples turning three or four
shades…
The luxury of a sun slanting
while the city is still tourist-heavy
with vine-ripe grapes bunching as in
families
and the wine on tables telling
full and round stories.
And so I ask myself –
Will I ever go to Paris
and sit at a sidewalk café
and tune my poetry as I would a guitar?
Whatever the tune,
the earth is beginning to spin,
wheat- and apple-heavy
toward a golden harvest,
then toward winter.
(First self-published in Chrysanthemum,
and then it appears in Water Chasing
Water, Kaya Press, 2013)
© Copyright, 2015,
Koon Woon. |