In the Center of Nothingness
In a city that boasts certainty,
my body wakes up in denial.
I toss and turn, hearing myself, as if
an ocean, having lost its sound,
still greeting everyone in the morning.
My phone, supine, competes with darkness,
forcing me to acknowledge distance and speed.
I hear the traffic of this city roaring like waves
in endless motion.
I wake outside myself:
this empty night finally owns me,
allowing me to gaze distantly at your lack of speed,
allowing my wakefulness to flow into yours.
Recurring Tides
Waiting, from the depth of a lotus,
with the scorching sun, the slowing mountains,
and our tightening faith,
for a sound that comes for an appointment.
It might not come. Only this promise
quickens our breath.
Our body, desire, and this landscape
delay our days neatly, like a coming tide.
But such delay is a fact we cannot disown.
Our relationship with the world
is no longer impatient.
To keep this vow, we endure the heat.
Life is nothing but a long wait.
A river roars—isn’t this the second half of our lives?
Silence is woven into its sound
as we wait for reconciliation.
The tide stirs the gazes on both shores
like the wings of birds.
The past, after the gathering, flows into the future
while every one of us (yourself included),
in gazing, let one river disappear into another.
Every drop of water marries
the muddy and vast surge coming forth.
Time stands still. We ask for nothing else.
While I merge quietly with this momentary gaze
for the next second to surpass the grass and trees around us.
I guard this speed, its vastness and precision.
Memorizing the Future in a City of Shadows
I
A road breaks the day: a river trembles like orchids,
the sky flips and cries out, falling into a shaded shrub.
Spring deserves our praise. A hand stretches out from the window
to catch the void and dust, caressing the few pedestrians in the wilderness.
The buildings are cold, inland seas, newly dug for quarantine.
Which soapberry wants to wake up? Will this April truly bloom?
So many souls resurrected, mottled with mildew.
Shadows knit a paradise, sweeping through rainless whirlpools.
A forgiving whale wades through turbulent corridors and twilight lamps
and swallows, in hunger, this antibody-producing dusk.
II
In the deep blue, we store up our gazes
to turn around and see groceries being delivered outside the window.
Glass records the pale fire, reflecting the murky Milky Way:
With a little silence, our future can pour out.
For twenty years, we have learned to rest at a quay,
lived with tribulus, yet our mirrors are full of expectant white gulls.
Stagnant, we sleep sorrowfully, with immune fins beside us,
a wave brave enough to dilute the cold streams of forgiveness in our bodies.
Remember those islanded moments, a warm current
pausing mid-air, with turtledoves circling, guarding the netted door.
Hu Sang is a poet and translator from Shanghai, China. The author of poetry collections Time Marks (2005), The Formgiver (2014), and Living Personally (2023), he has received numerous awards, including the Weiming Poetry Award (2009), the Jiangnan Poetry Award (2017), and the New Poet Award at Shanghai Poetry Festival (2022). Hu Sang has also translated the works of W. H. Auden, Robert Lowell, Czesław Miłosz and Wisława Szymborska. He is currently an associate professor at Tongji University, where he teaches literature and creative writing.
Weijia Pan is the author of Motherlands, selected by Louise Glück for the 2023 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize and published by Milkweed Editions in 2024. A poet and translator from Shanghai, China, his poems have appeared in AGNI, Boulevard, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Georgia Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. He received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Houston, where he was a winner of the Paul Verlaine Prize in Poetry. He is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.