In the Park Poem by Xiao Kaiyu

Today, as I had hoped, at four in the afternoon

reclining on a bench in Zhongshan park, I fell

deep asleep. Waking, I feel something's missing.


It is not in the women practicing warlike boxing,

or the bodies of the children playing football, but in me,

in that pleasing intermission as I slept by a lawn,


Some things vanished. In the belly of a pregnant woman,

the striking of a ball, the sound of cicadas, and the drone of an airplane

flying over the park I hear ever more pauses.


I once thought the sky is a bank

will lose its riches, its windstorms, its

emptiness; but me, I have nothing to offer up to be lost.


All I've ever had, in the time I can see,

is not mine. All I've ever had, in the time I speak,

has already vanished; without form, without quality.


I even know what disorders the clothing of weeping relatives at a funeral

is not the breath of the dead,

and remorse. Ooh, it isn't.