A Photo with You

by Na Ye
     trs. by Chen Xiaoyuan

Not you!  It’s the disappearing teenager in your body who holds me
It’s his proud and pure heart under the white shirt
The love written in the diary
The book dropped on the library stairs

What holds me!  Is the blue and waves which fill the Baltic Sea
The setting sun wet by rain   the roofless church
The hidden bells

And prayers   the sacred light of beautiful things
that my withering imagination can reach

When I sigh   It’s the baby in your body who refuses to enter the
world
His cry
— his dual contempt for life and death
holds me

— Here   In this mortal world
lonely people
buy and sell from each other
confess to each other

Physical intimacy doesn’t endow them with spiritual love
Or is it the reason you to write poetry?

The fountain of different forms of art   as if time has restored its
memory
I see in my closed eyes
A drop of ocea
flows

It’s the waves that hold me!  Not you
What I refused were the times
Not you nor me
“Whoever leaves the world first
shall write an elegy”

Listen to me: I come to the world to apologise to myself