New Coronavirus, As I See It (By Li Xiaohong) Poem by Denis Mair

by Li Xiaohong
(translated by Denis Mair)

(1)
At twilight
Lingering rays cling to branches
As if afraid even the lightest descent
Would rend a painful wound

The wings of wind
Unfold in deepening dusk
Heedless of spreading miasma

(2)
Always living up to the crown you wear
You use the simplest strings of code
To barge through each door of the body's defenses
Using the life-force to suck lives dry
One after another, for your clan's sake
You erected fearsome memorial plaques
Common cold, SARS, MERS, Covid-19

(3)
Whose shadow are you?
Holed up in creases of superannuated time
Keeping a hundred-million year question mark
From straightening itself in the human body

Are you living or non-living?
Are you here for struggle or subversion?
Are you a huge black hole?
Or a spot of shade left idle by the sun?

(4)
An up-and-comer can be formidable
The youngest are especially ruthless
You are like a bolt of black lightning
Streaking through time and space
Not content until the earth opens
And swallows up human beings

Under pale moonlight
Buds of springtime were bursting
Out came shapes of bats large and small
Shaking sobs onto the ground
Loosed by rain showers of April

(5)
Deal them out, all 52 of them!
Your shape-shifting permutations
520 mutations
5200 transformations
Always with more to come
However many angles you can aim from
Come up with that many transformations
With uncanny mathematical patterns
That make the human intellect look puny
Causing its face to turn purple
Turning the grand scheme of vaccination
Into a failed examination booklet
Scrawled and blotted, with blanks
And plenty of broken sentences

(6)
Spring has hatched the chirps of birds
And hung them from branch tips
Day and night, for months now
We have paced through each hour with caution
And joined our prayers with the moan of numbers
As today lets yesterday go

Insights from being housebound
Allow me to see for the first time
Some of life's most beautiful moments
Are not a matter of ascent
But are downward movement
Descent toward zero, into emptiness

(7)
Dawn awakens
In poetic lines of inflamed redness
Directly paging through time's traces
Hearing a voice therein
Where you came from
Is where you will go

Dusk spreads through a dense thicket
Throws stipples across the ground
Rage, resignation, dejection
Are just exclamation marks between lines
Brought up onto the surface of words
I can no longer make sense of recriminations
Or of rancor and clashes between human beings
I only envy the posture of a sickle
For the way it cuts down shadows
Reaping scrub plants of the soul
Clearing the land for a meadow

(8)
In this year of 2020 we found
That we are allergic to springtime
To chat in moonlight about tree blossoms
Or about a willow's drooping curve
Only earns you a glare from the stars

In this year of 2020
Spring is pasted to a canvas at the window
Showing the verisimilitude of abstraction

In this year of 2020
We are waiting at every moment
Waiting for an annotation
Like a newly planted scallion
Growing in soil watered by tears
Waiting for an article of faith
To get through dawn's bleak beauty
Back to the unadorned core

Faced with a winding road, mist-hidden in hills
Take long enough to find a split in time
And draw out the thread of patience