Hotel Viking
In the wake of a prefabricated passenger shipthe ocean, as if with an old cotton blanketweighs deeply on a body wide awakeThe sky in the eyes of a scattered school of fishgrows brighter and brighter. The bridge that spans thebrine crosses also the opaque middle-aged minddark path between two precise termsMy mother grievingwrites to her faraway sonWaterbirds, lonely, follow the lightstoward regions of cold where they hoverThis evening the hotel room's thermosystemthundered without rest. Number 634said the key in the unlit hallwayIn my homeland some valuablepersons are disappearing
Feature Date
- March 5, 2020
Series
- Translation
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Copyright © 2019 Translation by Hil Anderson & Keith Waldrop
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Hil Anderson is currently a Ph.D. student in Harvard University’s East Asian Languages and Civilization department, focusing on Chinese poetry, and a research scholar in the Yale Law School’s China Law Center.
Keith Waldrop is an editor of the small press, Burning Deck. His Silhouette of the Bridge received the America Award for Poetry for 1997. He has translated, among others, Anne-Marie Albiach, Claude Royet-Joumoud, Paol Keineg, and Dominique Fourcade.
Volume 19, No. 1
New York, New York
Founding Editor
Philip Fried
Cover Editor
Lynn Saville
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