Poem - A Poem for Thanksgiving, Poet - Dr. Ma Youngbo (China)
A Poem for Thanksgiving
Dr. Ma Youngbo (China)
I don’t know who to thank, yet I must give thanks
for the morning sun that moves over the dappled sycamore leaves.
There’s no wind - only one leaf falls after a long while
piling at the tree’s roots, keeping it warm.
Thank these trees - what they endure at night,they’ll never tell you.
Rows of colorful books
still rest quietly on the white cliff,
you can hear them make different sounds.
They watch your physical form
in stormy waves, unable to reach the shore.
Thank these books - for the days you can stay with them are few.
Thank your body, your most loyal companion,
it bears all the pain you heap upon it.
Thank your fragrant intestines, working day and night
like an iron chimney cutting through a winter room
providing you with warmth;
thank your heart—
a bear crouching on its hind legs—for poetry and blood are both wild.
Your old knees creak like rusted stairs
and your poor hands, their skin growing thinner by the day.
Thank all the thoughts radiating from your eye sockets
no matter how faint, they will still stir ripples in the universe’s great memory,
change something - though no one will ever know.
Curses and praises alike lie on the road to St. Elizabeth Hospital,
the dark green cedars’ cones，that ontological promise.
Thank the knots of words - because of them
you don’t fall into the vortex.
Even though they can only catch fragments of existence -
frozen gestures, flotsam from shipwrecks
some bright, some dark, filling your narrow room,
all around you - though they hold no truth.
Thank strangers, who drift near and far
even if they are just shells,
smooth or dull, occasionally extending a trembling antenna,
yet they always make you look with curiosity and feel joy.
They mark that a boring yet dangerous world
still exists, like a flower plucked and soon to fade.
I don’t know who to thank, yet I must give thanks
to the planet that carries all our trivial love and hate
still sailing alone through space.
like a murky little glass ball, along a cold orbit -
wars, plagues, separated bones, hammers, and sickles.
You stand on a frost-covered roof and look into the distance
where rows of huge silhouettes sink one after another on the horizon.
Swapner Vela Sahitya Patrika (The Raft of Dreams Literary Magazine) is a Bilingual magazine in which Bengali and English literature are published from Aurangabad, MSD, W.B. Editor - Md Ejaj Ahamed
Swapner Vela Sahitya Patrika (The Raft of Dreams Literary Magazine) is a Bilingual magazine in which Bengali and English literature are published by Md Ejaj Ahamed from Aurangabad, Murshidabad, W. B, India
