Ma, remember how you would hold me?
It was on days just like these:
we took naps under the curtains,
dozed off sun—us steamed sweet
like overused bamboo baskets
Simon hated the swan, but Mom loved it, and so he tried to love it too.
"She has a name. She had a family. She has a will of her own. I want you to remember that. Be careful. Be kind. And always remember that she is as much a person as you are.”
When I was a young boy, I had a spectacular adventure. I've know better than most how fickle Time can be. I feel him peering over my shoulder as I write. I hope you’ll let me finish before it’s time to go, old friend.
When I see the brook trout flying, I think I’m dreaming, but I follow it because dreaming or not—who wouldn't?
Her voice, gently rattling
like a bamboo thicket in the breeze—
greets me as I step over the threshold.
Xiang si ni le:
“I’ve missed you to death.”
When I could afford to be a dreamer,
the stars pulsed like a heartbeat
and the sloop-nosed moon left no sound;
Hazy humming bumblebees,
In poky, pollen-heavy flight,
Drift dull and dopey on the breeze
Before the newborn night,
The ocean was just a sliver in the distance, too far away to be seen from the ground. When the war is over, she thought, I’m going to go to the ocean, and I’ll swim and swim and swim, and I’m never going to stop.
Father sat beside his daughter said, “Marianne, smiles are silly things, a mere facial ornament, inconsequential, fleeting, even under right conditions. One could live a perfectly good and happy life without a perfectly good and happy smile.”