WORLD POETS MAGAZINE

  I am a Taiwanese poet    I am a humble poet As humble as a blade of grass The grass on the land has a name Thorns prick the skin But it has a name And I have a name too, Taiwan   I am a Taiwanese poet At every international poetry festival I read aloud in my beautiful mother tongue, Taiwanese Telling the stories of Taiwan's joys and sorrows Please do not change my country's name If I cannot attend your magnificent literary event No matter how splendid and alluring the laurel wreath are   If I read aloud in Taiwanese And you feel it is beautiful language Please applaud me Yes, I await the world's friendly response In the name of my beloved Taiwan This is my humble wish Though humble, I persist Even the most splendid literary laurel wreath If it cannot be in the name of my nation, Taiwan It is meaningless to me If one day I die On my tombstone only need one line: Here lay a Taiwanese poet   A Cave     By a dark, dingy cave, A soldier with a pistol...

  Etymology                       The Nobel Prize in Physics 1986 was awarded to jointly to Gerd Binnig                     and Heinrich Rohrer for their design of the scanning tunneling microscope.   It seems like, on one day in Spring, overnight while peepers are singing and mating, buds emerge. Then shortly after, over another night, buds spread into a canopy of leaves shading tadpoles in vernal pools. The refinished table by the window in my upstairs room can’t do anything like that. I mean, if you cut a piece of it and examine it under a scanning tunneling electron microscope you can see atoms. If you cut a piece of tree, you see the same atoms, yet these bud in the Spring. What leaves a tree when it becomes a table? I’ve been thinking about this for some time. Only I’d rather think less and feel more. Thinking is more like doing, an armor that shields one from ...

  Those Days in Letterkenny   Buncrana stank of smelly fish, Letterkenny was very heaven – tonnes of Oatfield   butter and sugar and cream. They made chocolate toffees – Emeralds and Eclairs .   We’d savour their scent on summer holidays when you told us about Peggy’s Leg –   a name that made us laugh – sticks of sugar wrapped in cellophane,   all the more mysterious for our never having tasted them.   I want to ask you, did you love cough sweets, lemon drops, clove rock?   There’s so much I need to learn about you – like why you left farming   and decided to join the army. Why weren’t you a fan of The Beatles,   not even The Rolling Stones – what was it about you preferred   the tenor voice of John McCormack – Tom Waits was a fan,   but that would mean nothing to you? I loved the faint taste of coconut   in an Oatfield Emerald caramel – did you, Dad? There’s so much   I don’t know about you – and you nearl...

  Timeless Gardens   In poetry’s warm snares melancholy has built a nest for words banished from the gardens of Heaven, which pine for their homeland, for the fruit of the Tree of Goodness which still grows where it was planted by the eldest son of time.   From the icy plains of our lives trackers come into our dreams, and fate, with a hand of stone, gathers flowers and dew in gardens of unchanging seasons – to feed sorrow on its journey upon the Earth, while poets stand at the gates of the Creator trusting in his silence –   which they want to turn into words, into a cry whose echo, thrown back from the stars, will become a magic stone, a crystal that can sculpture silence, and be used to write pure poetry.     In the Squares of Babilon   Plug your ears with your palms, do not listen to the conversation between your time and some other time.   Do not heed the effort of this moment to run away from itself and from it all.   Are calamiti...