Jeffrey Yang is the author of four poetry collections: Line and Light; Hey, Marfa; Vanishing-Line; and An Aquarium. He is the translator of Bei Dao’s Sidetracks,Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo’s June Fourth Elegies, Ahmatjan Osman’s Uyghurland, the Farthest Exile (with the author), Su Shi’s East Slope, Bei Dao’s autobiography City Gate, Open Up, and an anthology of classical Chinese poems, Rhythm 226. He edited the anthologies Birds, Beasts, and Seas: Nature Poems; Time of Grief: Mourning Poems; and the collection The Sea Is a Continual Miracle: Sea Poems and Other Writings by Walt Whitman. He is the editor at large at New Directions Publishing, and lives in Beacon, New York.
Photo credit: Nina Subin
Selected poems
by Jeffrey Yang
It is time for dawn’s bell to ring out
It is time for dead souls to rise out of the abyss
It is time for the seasons to blink
It is time for flowers to bloom flowers to fall and spit out the pits of fruit
It is time for the spiderwebs to reconstruct logic
It is time to shoot down the old memories
It is time for the executioner to crave an empty bed
It is time for starlight to connect the living and the dead
It is time for women to smile sweetly in advertisements
It is time for the banks’ tigers to come out of their cages
It is time for stone statues to walk forth
It is time for the steam whistle to shriek and upend the sky
It is time for the Age of Anonymity
It is time for poetry to disclose the will of heaven
It is time
Copyright © 2024, Jeffrey Yang, translated from the Chinese written by Bei Dao, Sidetracks, New Directions Publishing
from Sidetracks (I)
the Chinese written by Bei Dao