poetry

A poem for national cat day – by Alicia Lui

Today a yellow-brown cat dashed across

As I walked with wind on my ears.

Surely you must be cold, I thought.

What a pity to be a stray!

My three cats at home sit and watch

As I latch the windows on approaching gloom.

Together they cry

Another Beijing winter to bloom.

Lost homes – a poem by Yuan Yang

The summer soon gone,

I was walking in my first hometown.

The guardsmen at the district gate

watched me like a stray white cat:

unthreatening.

A poem by Eleanor Goodman

Men don’t play these wild games of mahjong.

A search for sanctuary

brings the women to the fourteenth floor

where communal breezes

come from the hall

and the open doors are draped

with torn sheets for the July

heat to escape. 

A sense of where you belong – by Yuan Yang

When I was four and went to school

in Manchester, the kids would ask:

“What’s your name? Where you from?”

and I would say, “Ni shuo shen me?”

Which is Mandarin for the kind

of bewilderment you have as a kid

from inner-mountain-basin China

who has just come through Heathrow.

Poetry for along the way – by Susie Gordon

THIS POEM FIRST APPEARED IN UNITED VERSES

Over plains and hills we came

for miles. Miles and months we trod west

in a camel train, carrying silks and furs,

jade and ivory, wood and metal

from Chang’an. Turkan, Altai, Tashkent, Palmyre:

miles of tundra, desert, forest, lush brown foothills -

obsidian sky;

each night a caravanserai.

In Damasc by the mosque my father heard it said

there was a lodging ten miles out of town

with a bath-house tiled in topaz, day beds thrown with fleeces,

and a poet who spoke and sang of truths, of secrets.