A Promise to Meet in This Life.

Huang Xiang ; Yeh, Michelle

A Promise to Meet in This Life

 Sheer quietude
 Lying face-up under the sky
 The body is
 An open book

 Each page I turn
 Is a day
 Of the known and the unknown
 A new day
 That touches the heart for no reason

 Words written down
 Bring the mist-drenched shrubs
 To streaming tears
 They gather round to decipher
 That which is not written down
 Hither and thither
 Let the elusive wind
 Venture a guess

 A lifetime is like a promise to meet
 As if I had waited for this
 For a thousand years
 Above and below my head
 Sheer emptiness
 Between the tips of grass and the fingers
 Birds and clouds
 Flow by

 2005

Translations from the Chinese By Michelle Yeh

Huang Xiang was born in Hunan Province, China, in 1941. He began writing poetry in the 1950s and has been imprisoned repeatedly for his work. In 1978 he founded "Enlightenment," the first underground writers' society, and started a literary magazine under the same name. In exile in the United States since 1997, he has been a resident poet in Pittsburgh under the PEN Cities of Asylum program for writers and currently lives in New Jersey with his wife and son. Huang's Out of Communist China, a bilingual anthology, was published in 2003, and a new selection of his poems, A Lifetime Is a Promise to Keep, will be published in spring 2008. As a juror for the 2008 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, he nominated Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser for the award.

Michelle Yeh is Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures at the University of California, Davis. Her primary research focuses on modern Chinese poetry from China and Taiwan throughout the twentieth century. She also works on classical Chinese poetry, comparative poetics, and translation. She is the translator and editor of the forthcoming selection of Huang Xiang's poems, A Lifetime Is a Promise to Keep.