the lily pond

Ripples/Leaves

 

In the past, we always praised stable things.
Yet you appear in the pond, and keep making ripples, which,
together with the lights of dawn and shades of dusk
transform into new image after new image.
A series of crystalline lights appear appear at the margins, changing
the glittering organization in the pond, breaking it up, then
                                                               making,
a new kind of order. My roots and leaves feel being circled
                                                               around—
I seem to feel fishes kissing all over my body,
Then flowing away in small detailed patterns,
Amid these movements, I want to hold on—yet cannot
Grab any stable centre I can use for a pause,
I cannot but let go of the safety of the soil,
turn over the silt sediments inside of me, and feel the waves
brought by the light breeze (Leung Ping-Kwan gun, in Chinese, Books and the City, 147).

One of a series of poems on lotus leaves by Hong Kong postcolonial poet, Leung Ping-Kwan, appearing in his Books and the City. Hong Kong: Heung Gong, 1985. This poem was translated by feminist postcolonial critic, Rey Chow and appears in her article, "Things, Common/Places, Passages of the Port City: On Hong Kong and Hong Kong author, Leung Ping-Kwan ," which was reprinted in a Special Issue in of West Coast: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and Criticism, number 21(30/3), Winter 1996/7, in conjunction with the Pomelo Project and City at the End of Time, a series of public talks on Hong Kong in 1997, given in Vancouver, B.C during February 14-15 March 1997, in part, with the support of the Discipline and Place Collective, UBC.

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