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Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-57131-423-9
Pages: 96
Publish Date: March 2006
Genre: Poetry
Wu Wei
Poems
BY Tom Crawford
Rain
Rain in Chongqing is pretty much
like rain in Portland—
it comes down wet from Heaven
and when it’s sudden,
without warning,
in both cities people shriek
and scatter. Newspapers double
for umbrellas,
dirty sidewalks glisten,
a mother runs out
to pull in her little boy.
Flags go up everywhere
in excitement—“We surrender,
we surrender.”
In spare and resonant language, the first half of this collection hallows a memory of the author’s time spent in China, evoking the exotic sights and smells of the villages he visited—the overnight sleeper to Chengdu, a young girl butchering her first chicken, street monkeys dancing for a crowd. Upon returning home, every piece of the ordinary world seems washed clean and the poems of the second half are infused with Buddhist sentiment and Eastern thought, laying hold of the mundane as the medium through which profundity and grace can be found.
“If small things are celebrated in these poems, the poems themselves are great acts of love."
—Edward Field, author of Magic Words
