by Agneta Falk

The wind brought me here
into a hidden corner
on a rocky beach

something about the light
the sky and sea melting
into one, into me

the pounding waves
feeling like I look inside

and there she is, my mother
and all the mothers before her
dancing on a wing of breath

becoming my breath
and nothing can stop me now
from releasing a torrent of tears

for all those who’ve passed
and those wandering over the earth
in search of a new home

where bombs don’t fall.

by Jack Hirschman

1.

You and I were fated
to be comrades for life,
Jidimajia.

Even before we met
for your 5^th Qinghai Lake
International

Poetry Festival
in Xining and you visited
Aggie’s and my room

with Jami Proctor-Xu
and bottles of baijiu.  In fact
30 years ago

when you were a young
man and I was
translating Albanian

poetry and found
I loved best of all the word
Xhuxhimaxhuxha,

I realize now
I was rhythmically destined
to meet you as

not only the Chairman
of the All China Writers
Union, but the major

poet of one of
the 56 minorities
in China, the Yi

people, — you, of
the Nuosu “black” strain in
that tribe, no doubt why

you could pen such a
magnificent ode to Nelson
Mandela and

receive the torrential
applause of the Yellow,
Yangtze, and Lancang

Rivers that Qinghai is the
birthplace of, under fireworks
of bursting buckwheat,

as we spoke of how
I was a kabbalist Jew,
and you might be one too,

and this said with heart
and humor as Jami
translated us from

me to you and you to me,
we laughing all the way to
the bottoms of our glasses.

2.

And so you had me sit
next to you at all the meals,
the American communist,

and I toasted, toasted
with one Chinese poet or
prefecture after another,

and we toasted each other
with those tiny, delicate jiggers
of Moutai baijiu

and that slowly spinning
table flooded with dishes
of all tasty sorts,

and the next day bussed
to Qinghai Lake and there
— if I’d not already

sensed it — we realized
what a great international
revolutionary you are

by seeing the wall that’s
even Greater than the Great Wall,
the Wall of poets

with images of Pablo Neruda,
Langston Hughes, Cesar Valleo,
Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs,

Walt Whitman, Du Fu,
Mahmoud Darwish, Guo
Muruo, William Blake
        Yongyuan, richu,
            riluo, xiantian qiutian
                dongtian chuntian!

        Forever, sunrise
sunset, summer autumn
winter spring!

And rectangularly
from the Wall out over a
field of grass, 24

hugh statues of figures
in the epic poems of the world,
from Gilgamesh, to the Song

of Roland, to Beowulf,
to the Kalevala of Fin
and,
and the epic of Armenia

in what is without doubt
the greatest homage to the art
of poetry in the world.

3.

My chubby brilliant
friend, you who said, “Robots
don’t bloom,” and that

poetry “has become
an affirmation of the
deeply held human

longing to return
to where we came from . . . to our
spiritual Garden of Eden”

certainly with poems
and brilliant essays Festivals
and other projects

have done enough to
earn a Nobel Prize for the
nobility of poetry

as the innate language
of the people of the earth
in its song of raising

the banner of human
Kindness and Beauty over
all and every one
of the more than thirty
countries that China graced with
unforgettable welcome,

with avalanches
of books, red cashmere scarves
and the colorful

costumes of the Yi
into whose minority
of eight million

souls we all were
admitted as honorary
members for life.

Bravo! I shout, who
taught you that word
that now, at the end

of every performance,
you shout out, Bravo!
with glee galore;

and, as always with China,
there wants to be, unendingly,
more.  More.  MORE!

by Frederick Wilbur

Fungi finger the punky heart
of wood with inkings of prophesy
that rot is sure to come —
first corruption of once stalwart grain,
like the expanding blemish on an apricot,
like guilt sabotaging the sacred of memory.

Though these scribbles are scriptures of ruin,
such wood is scouted out, indeed, prized
by wood turners whose round truth
is the vessel of their days, is a
sympathetic reading of Time’s dispossessed.

by Frederick Wilbur

As soon as snow disappears
from the weather forecast,
I rake the gravel that plows have left
in moraines along the state right-of-way.

As a conscientious citizen,
I maintain this grass strip —
otherwise, the curve ahead would
be weed-blind and a prayer too late.

Through the grass which sprints
toward a mowing, the silver tines
coax the stones toward coal shovel
and wheelbarrow.  A ragged sweeping
to be sure, a modest precaution.

I return the gray rocks to roadside gulley.
My rotator cuff curses the budging
of boulders from the suck of earth.
Perhaps this is a small price.

Resting, I notice a honeybee
on the season’s first dandelion
as bright as any hope and I wish
her well in gleaning the weed’s dust.
I know it is what she must do
for her hive to survive.