Ti-Anna Wang

There is a daughter who speaks about her father
As democracy once spoke for the people

Who are not deficient
They are not absent from their freedom

We live for purposes
And dreams like Chinese democracy

We were not born this way
We were moved by the world

To speak about injustice, human rights violations
We witnessed sacrifices for unspeakable courage

We are not martyrs, we are still fathers
Though imprisoned we dwindle in time

That spirit lives on like 1989
Whispers that China will shed One-State party rule

Warnings that the U.S. will reinvent tyranny
We are from both worlds, hospitable and ruthless

Male and female, politics is in everything
There’s no escaping corruption, revolution

Law, and the will for freedom is a will to power
And freedom is never free from inequality

There is no promised land of perfection
Only rudimentary ideas of what should be

There is a daughter who speaks of justice
And I cry for all the ways which we are
Enslaved, imprisoned, not free.

Ti-Anna, you are not a dissident
You are the heir to the new world
And it speaks Mandarin, and it’s free
Free in a patriotism of being global citizens

Free in the hope that our lineage leads
To a place where there are no dissidents
There is no abandonment, only people
Living and loving the only way they know how.

Life Armour

 

 

 

Xiao Wei, flee into the western horizon

I will not find you, I cannot

Go too far from where I am, my heart

 

Has no courage for risks or a sacred recess

Into the wild, I am a tame overshadowed thing

There is no goddess in my alley

 

Only the dark, and the damp

Upon the altars I’ll be the settled leaves

In graceful goblets of my fate

 

I’ll be, the one that watches you go

Through the glad festivities of a woman’s life

To build and caress and multiply

Xiao Wei, do we only desire normal lives

There is majesty in duty I suppose

 

Though as in the old days I have wept

For sameness, wept that I was different

Though all life is invocation

And one day I’ll have to finish innovation

Over being a role, a pillar, a nest.

Princess of the Sun

 

 

 

 

Xiao Wei, how could one indeed not

Repeatedly feel the wonder of this world

This cosmos, so green and so vast

With eyes like yours, with the twinkle of Shengyang

 

The sun from the honest world of the north

Xiao Wei, over whomever one really

Wanted to meet, I must give salute and bow low

This world is full of goodness, if we

 

Know how to find it, and sweat the

Speechless feverish fires of passion

That break our trembling months into

Golden prosperity, we are all ghosts and memories

 

Xiao Wei, how to find experience

The spring blooms of our native touch?

Until the seasons grant us some joy

So free and pure that our hearts are broken

 

Open, in the fields, beneath the stars

With children and the legacies of our minds

That ache and aspire to repeat the experience

You may not recall the Shen river

 

Where we once met, I had another form then

And you were the bride of the entire world.

White Nights of Beijing

China, do you hear whispers of the people?
I’ve written down the words
That a country doesn’t dare to speak
But the firewalls are large and heavy

And Hong Kong remains lethargic too
The umbrella revolution didn’t get far
Can students change the world?

Let the leaves rustle and the economy slow
The horn cries and the people do not move
It’s back to the drawing room, I hear
The factories are becoming robotized

You travel an entire day to bring
Your Mother a bouquet of flowers
She has never received one before like this

You came to Canada in idleness and prosperity
But now you realize the years pass silently
In the homeland, while you think of yourself
The people suffer, more miserable than you

I’ve not lit the candles but I know
Which way the wax runs, in times of
Masks worn in dark corners of Beijing

The air is no longer pure, sunsets gloom
With the light of the drunk sounds of
Brainwashing and patriotic outcries
This is not North Korea, but this is control

I speak those words, today, that come
Born of the spirit of history, I know
How the decades go, preserving tradition

Enhancing glory, bright bouquets that press
The people into the streets, without answers
A clavichord of feudalism staining
The times with guilt, that some make it

While the sea of people must go without
I will not belong to a world of inequality
I will not thrive until we can share it.

P.S. A world of nations and patriotism is not a free world. One world, one future.

The Silent Revolution is Inevitable

– Pictured, Tina Chang (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tina_Chang)

Ascent of Asia

I am haunted by how little our children
Know, what we have done
To each other, to those we deemed
Beneath us, to the Earth…..

How a republic falls and how
Democracy can lie, how News can be distorted
How money hides its debt
By printing more, by pretending we are alright

Or worse, an old idea of Nationalism
Idols of a world out dated, euro-centric
I’m haunted by how little
Millennials realize Asia is the new Queen

Why do they not learn Mandarin, Korean?
We forever think we are the center
Of the globe, but I’m not a daughter
Or a son of East or West

I am haunted by how little writers
Write about revolution, about change
We cannot always repeat what others have said
We cannot always unravel in our

Personal voice, there’s a secret stairway
To broader concerns, more existential themes
There, the ultimate fiction is reality
There is a new world ready to be born
Will you join?

One unexpected delight

-Wanting Qu bridges cultures, namely Vancouver and China, and I have to admit, I’m a bit smitten of this song (that inspired this poem).

One unexpected delight

You exist in my dreams
Like an intimate breath of hope
A radiant inexhaustible humour

That becomes a voice
And when I see you in the world
A voice whispers in my mind
That we are all connected
If you had the desire

To do good or beautiful things
I know you will, even as you live
In my heart, like a shade of light

Not like a stranger, but a feeling
That needs no explanation
An unexpected delight
That has a queer power of destiny

In the grace of your eyes
I see the youth of everyone’s dreams
Like an intimate sign of

How the world is big and small
The fate of all the worlds
That becomes a voice
I see you in all life

A voice whispers in my heart
That we are all connected
If you evolve to find a way

Out of selfishness, remember
The others who stood by you
Were not always the expected ones
Where the moon can set below
The Pleiades and familiar stars
You exist in my dreams
Without any hesitation
So I leave you there until
I am able to perceive you
In the blessed days ahead of me.

—————————–

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanting_Qu

Bounty of a Mandarin Candle

My wife, your hands they fly
From my eyes into the day
where the last sunshine
touches my face in throbbed

Turquoise where the ocean
Meets the sky in barenaked syllables
A flower petal found of sunsets
My wife, we live together in

A honeysuckle celestial capsule
Absolutely in our own world
My wife, how the darkness has
Swallowed us in the mercy of

her closed wings of grandiose shelter
My wife, I love to watch the
miniature empire of your face
With the characteristics of my

eternal notebook, the lift of perfume
and laughter, the garden-dream
of your tenderness of blue material
Where life seems prosperous & lucky

My wife, the last crazy sunbeam
Of my open heart, has arrived in your form
As the flare of corn in the soil
Or the gift of rain to the natural world.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/candle-for-every-soul-102428705

Patriarchy in Exile

It is not doom we fear, nor extinction
We live for the brilliant present day –
Erected as if for the first time, we
Are built to survive, endure, come home to find

How our colossal steps keep us dreaming
There is no permanent haunt, we know
How to move on, forwards, afterwards
Adapt, before we fall, as we reclaim

The living bronze of another golden day
Even from futility, we have resilience
In the form of youth, and immortality –
All we find are changing altars

Alternate futures scrawled in time-machines
There is only the riddle of collective ignorance
The bribery of the profit motive of the illegitimate
That strive for supremacy, not love

It is not testosterone that makes us strong
Selfishness and vanity move us only so far.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/CUBOZOA-III-393220443

Orphans of Asia

May 22, 2013

The orphan of Asia is crying in the wind
She is this young, not old any more
Lost with the new age at her heels
Nobody cares to play fair with her
She must find her own literacy
In games of power and pitfalls of fortune
Create her own ideology of feminism
Dreaming of bananas, pineapples and freedom
Dancing in the street, a new order of consciousness
She is a kingdom of honey-sweet sugar
A pragmatism of following ancient ingenuity
The orphan of Asia is a sleek mistress of the west
Parody of the Earth, song-mother of empires
Out of Africa, home of the first-settlers
How large is your opportunity
Why else would you be smiling? India? China?
The orphan of Asia has Japanese wings
Singaporean inclinations, Taiwanese wise-sayings
The orphan of Asia practices many religions, and none
She does not sleep in her mother’s arms
Everybody tries to take her favorite toys
Lips of forgotten genius, voice of new originality
Pakistan, Malaysian, Indonesia
The orphan of Asia is crying in the wind
Still remaining muddled, trapped, a lost kitten
Under the weight of a terrifying World Government
In place before the outer signs are seen
Your air still sneezes intellectual adolescence
Your spirituality has been banished by your politicians
Your soil still stinks of colonial dictators
Your education still forces you to betray yourselves
What nationalistic statements can save you from yourself?