Dusk Prayer by Yongbo Ma

 

Quang Nguyen Vinh

Dusk Prayer

Life ultimately depends on forgiveness and forgetting,  

without strength enough to love your enemies,  

you must learn to pardon. Even the fiercest hatred  

drowns in time’s wasteland, collapses into a heap of causes,  

its form is unrecognizable,  

intense love and hate both drain life’s essence,  

diminish dignity—for the soul has its own purpose,  

unknown even to you.  

As years pass, love and hatred become others’ dramas,  

you retreat further into the role of spectator,

human activities drift like distant winter fields,  

you have your own questions, others bear  

no true connection, at most, they are footnotes  

in life’s textbook, references in margins.  

You linger more within your own territory,  

your solitude is a house shielding the world,  

a cliff jutting farthest into the sea,

its gabled roof, tiled in red,

its front door bolted, back door aglow,  

snow falls in its attic, and the cellar serves as a lab  

where stifled ghosts sprout from tubers,  

the laughter of countless children is hidden in the garden.  

Your slowness mirrors the stillness within,  

a single word sustains you for days,  

few external events pierce your veil—  

tides absorbed by countless tiny caverns,  

your curiosity is limited to just one old telescope, 

when you rise from your depths to peer through it  

on storm clouds surging into being at the horizon.

To lose your way is to return home,  

at last, you forgive yourself.

© ¥ongbo Ma

Yongbo Ma

Ma Yongbo was born in 1964, holds a Ph.D., is a representative of Chinese avant-garde poetry, and is a leading scholar in Anglo-American poetry. He is the founder of polyphonic writing and objectified poetics. He is also the first translator to introduce British and American postmodern poetry into Chinese.

He has published over eighty original works and translations since 1986, including 9 poetry collections. He focused on translating and teaching Anglo-American poetry and prose, including the work of Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens, Pound, Amy Lowell, Williams, and Ashbery. He published a complete translation of Moby Dick, which has sold over 600,000 copies. The Collected Poems of Ma Yongbo (four volumes, Eastern Publishing Centre, 2024), comprising 1178 poems, celebrates 40 years of writing poetry.

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