Ode to Night
Coldness plasters
my hut
with thick snow
I quiver in bed
like a fish
caught and thrown
on the ice
to flop
in desperate throes.
~
The Gradation of Our Being
Day by day we wait to see
seeds sprout into a fuzzy green
and grow for a good harvest.
We have never felt
the land has grown us as well—
our hands calloused,
skin browned, minds furrowed,
and tongues localized.
We no longer look like a group
of urban youths
or sound like strangers
distanced by the peasants,
we have plowed our bodies
and sowed us as cottonseeds.
~
Endurance
Your absence
like a heavy hammer
strikes my thought of you
into a dagger
shining cold and
hanging over my heart.
Each day
I forget you when I
bend my mind
in the paddy
to cut rice
with a sharp sickle,
but each night
when the moon peeks through
the broken window,
you appear
from nowhere
to slice my thought
into stripes
of pale moonlight
to bandage my wound.
~
Lines for My Helpers
1
Spring wind:
fecund smell
of the tilled fields
swings on the tail
of the water buffalo
2
Summer evening:
the cow chews cud
by the shed
as I go bathing
in the creek
3
Autumn dusk:
talk to the donkey
hauling cotton
on the rutty road
to the village
4
Winter road:
the horse and I
deliver provisions
to the peasants
digging waterways
~
A Dog-eared Page
One day a new acquaintance came over to chat over coffee in my apartment when I served as a Fulbright Scholar at his university. He bragged about his book collection—ten thousand shelved books almost touched the ceiling of his study.
harvest break
wind and sunshine chasing
over wheat
Like a glib-tongued salesman, he persuaded me to buy a volume of Chinese history and culture for self-study. I wowed at his bookucation, uttered, “You must be a fat bookworm. Have you bitten all your books?” He shook his head shyly. A librarian for thirty years, he had an irresistible desire for books.
waiting for lunch
an ant crawling
in my empty bowl
One evening after taking my after-dinner walk, I went to his condo to borrow a book about reeducation in the Cultural Revolution. Sitting in his tiny study where a leg stretch would knock down a pagoda of books, I opened the one I wanted: two fat bookworms cruising on a dog-eared page.
bell striking
the moon over fields
folded in half
~
Jianqing Zheng is the author of A Way of Looking and editor of Conversations with Dana Gioia and Sonia Sanchez’s Poetic Spirit through Haiku, and five other books. He is professor of English at Mississippi Valley State University, where he serves as editor of Valley Voices. A reeducated youth in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Zheng has lived in Mississippi since 1991.