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Qi Wang Poem
In the most interior halls
Of grandfather, opa, Herr Uberlebende
His mind
Behind the film that shrouds his eyes
(Fading, opaque, impenetrable)
There is a gap between the rooms that line the dusted floors--
A hole between the satanic years
When worlds erupted and world war too,
Between eight year old boy and that
Thirteen year old half-man
(His portrait was burned with all the rest,
That filled the uninhabitable rooms)
A line of broken apartments hide
Padlocked, wired, sealed by ghosts.
They lie repressed beneath the floors
And grandpapa, my dear
Has not been to clean them since
The doctors taught him they didn’t exist
Don’t exist
Extract your belongings
(We’ll pay your fees)
Whitewash the walls—
And then you leave.
For it would be your death to enter
Into those vacant rooms
Starved walls
Where you, yes you,
(Oh Opa, pappy)
Emaciated your soul
Deprived, you
Forsook your abode—
When an eight year old Liebling
Peering between life and death
(Retreating behind his hole in the wall)
In his splendid apartment—his very own
Looked up
At the S.S. poster boy—
And Himmler’s devil asked—
“Who is home?”
And the answer came back, in echoes
Echoes
“No one, no one is home
There is an empty apartment, empty, empty;
and no one, no one is home.”
Lies come true.
Now only echoes and the massacred
tread in the purged, forbidden rooms.
Copyright © Qi Wang | Year Posted 2010
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Qi Wang Poem
No enlightened poet am I proclaimed,
Rhyming high-flown philosophies in poesy,
(Instead, I only scratch out my words
In verses of winds and scents of spring--
Of the shades of the light crowning wintertime clouds,
Sing the grace of the wings in a homecoming sky.)
For I am no more a poet than you,
And you, with your verses, no more than I.
(And so I write of the white blush of moon
Not referencing love, neither lost nor found
And rhyme the rhythm of the lapping sea
With the throb of the heart in the desert heat.)
For what more, oh poets, are poems than beauty?
(Write: The ethereal river spills sheens iridescent
Beneath the expanse of the heavenly lights)
And what more than beauty is life?
(Breathing perfumes and sparkles of nectars and grass
Spelling effervescence within the infinite hues.)
Copyright © Qi Wang | Year Posted 2010
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Qi Wang Poem
Claws of fire distending from her emerald back
My Arizona lies beneath the white speck of sun
Whose icy blades pierce the glitter of her veins,
Green and gold beneath its sheath of rusting red.
Arizona, my piece of Mojave, languidly dreams
In her sea-bitten bed of New England sand
Ignoring the eyes of the jack-rabbit whose
Ceramic curves reflect the tremulous spines
Of glowing Arizona atop the window sill.
The radiator coughs its gusts and rumbles
To assuage the chill of the December azure.
Arizona stares at the watery sky.
The painted rabbit has woken the longing,
A primal desire for a dusted breeze
Within her potted, makeshift summer
Of stuffy air, of lumber and brick--
Yearning for juniper under unwashed blues,
Prickly Arizona, her beauty spells pain.
Copyright © Qi Wang | Year Posted 2010
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