Poems of Poet Xi Ke [China]

Poet Xi Ke [China]

Poet Xi Ke, a renowned contemporary Chinese poet, is the pen name of Yang Weizhou. Born in 1962 in Chongxin, Gansu Province, he began his poetic career in the 1980s. In the 1990s, he went to Shenzhen to curate an exhibition of poetry by vagrant poets. His works have been widely published in various literary journals. In 2012, he was invited to participate in the 32nd World Congress of Poets held in Israel. He has produced over ten poetry collections, including The Winding Hui River, The Copper Pot, The Ancient Fort, Wind Bells, Me and Some of My Days, No Need to Say Goodbye in This Life, Selected Poems of Xike, Rural Past (bilingual Chinese-English edition), and The Village Mistress in the Gengchen Year (Swedish version, Arabic version, Russian version). His prose works include Valley Land, My Life Has Nothing to Do with You, and I Am Still Alive. His poetry has been translated into English, French, German, Russian, Arabic, Spanish, Japanese, Dutch, Ukrainian, Hindi, Albanian, Romanian, Swedish, Korean, and many other languages. He is the recipient of the 7th China Contemporary Poetry Award and the 2025 World Literature Award (WOW, Russia). He is a member of the China Writers Association and currently resides in Xi’an.
 
 
 
 
The Pretender
 
Reading yields no news
The best poems are collected by the internet
The storm needs to be redesigned
Let the night depart on the high-speed rail
Throw sorrow into the fog
New energy replaces the electric light
 
Because of the internet
Life becomes chaotic
Imagination, already worn and decrepit
Living together in smartphones
Getting pregnant in dreams
The sky is hung with white flowers of funeral
 
The pretender needs no pretense
The clock's hands point exactly to midnight
The tribe grows smaller and smaller
The spine bends under its heavy burden
Body hair begins to recede
Carelessly, thoughts too can be lost
 
The face wears fear like a startled beast
Hands sweat from nervousness
The heart stops suddenly from excitement
In urgent need of an organ transplant
Matches and tinder are suddenly lost
All re-enter the night's samsara
 
 
Ancient Buddhist Temple
 
So small a room, yet
Filled with angels standing
As if there were endless space
For pure white wings to fly
And deliver the world of the living
 
No need for eternal vows
They come as they are, leave as they will
Now the harvest is in the field
At the edge of the farmland
Ox carts drive all things of the mortal world
 
Only here burns the incense in peace
After counting all the joys and sorrows of the world
A single wisp of incense
Is enough to turn the heart homeward
 
 
A Trace of Love
 
After passing through a stretch of time, on a vacant lot
Sunflowers are piled up
What force has piled them together?
In the rain, a group of youths are chopping down
The green sunflowers
I can no longer write the word “love”
If it were the past, or yesterday
I would have shielded her with my arms
From the rain or the flying knife scars
 
But today, I only smell the breath of sunflowers
                    (Translated by Dr. Yan Haifeng)