Tang Guo – Looking at Mt. Gu from a distance – translated by Mimi Chang


I’ve been walking toward it, toward it.

I am one thousand miles closer to it now

but it doesn’t move toward me at all. No, not at

all.

If it could, will it move toward me

even if just for a few miles?

I could have held that tree, yes that tree on the mountain top, 

to cry

or left my teeth marks on a stone

at the foot of that mountain.

Tang Guo was born in 1972 in Sichuan province of China but lives in the Dêqên autonomous county of Yunnan, southwest China. As an “internet poet” of the 21st century,  she has published two collections of poems, For You and Zipper—Poems 2000-2014