from Two Inch Fables

Marilyn Chin

Yellow gold is meaningless
Learning is better than pearls
A woman without brilliance
Leaves nothing but dim children
 
You can hawk your gold if you’re hungry
Sell your mule when you’re desperate
What can you do with so many poems
Sprouting dead hairs in an empty coffin
 
*

Lotus: pink     dewlapped     pretty
Lotus: upturned palm of my dead mother
Lotus:  a foot       a broken arch
Lotus:  plop      and a silent     ripple
 
*
 
I hum and stroll
And contemplate a poem
While young boys are dying
In West Darfur
 
I hum and stroll
And contemplate a poem
While young boys are dying
In West Darfur

“Just as [William] Blake saw the world in ‘a grain of sand,’ with oppositional force, I try to capture the world’s injustice in one temporal ‘Chinese American quatrain.’ The first piece is comprised of two classic call-and-response quatrains. The first voice offers an argument and the second voice counters it. In the second piece I employ what I call the ‘cruel juxtaposition’ strategy. I juxtapose the history of oppression against women by using disturbing elliptical images of the dead mother’s body parts against a reference to Basho’s famous frog poem, which describes the perfect Zen distilled moment. Two heavy incongruous ideas happening on one tiny lotus pad. The third piece offers a cruel juxtaposition self-consciously contrasting an entitled American poet’s easy life against those of dying boys in a faraway war. And just in case the reader misses the message, I duplicate the quatrain for emphasis.” —Marilyn Chin

ADVICE (for E)

Be the stealth between stones

The abracadabra amongst clones

Be the fighting fish with a fancy tail

The wizard who deifies gnomes

No worry be happy missiles flying

While innocents are dying

Marilyn Chin

2022

Shadowless Shadow

The Great Matriarch says: There is a dog who barks at his own shadow, which is not there, for in mid-day sun, there is no shadow.

Notice, if I give him a dumpling or a chew-toy, he stops barking, but he does not stop when he sees his shadowless shadow. He barks with warning, with alarm.

He barks louder and louder, snapping his jaws, swallowing sputum, on his haunches, ready to pounce.

Marilyn Chin

1926

Poems

from Two Inch Fables

More by this poet

ADVICE (for E)

Shadowless Shadow

From “LOCK DOWN IMPROMPTKU”

Poems

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from Two Inch Fables

More by this poet

ADVICE (for E)

Shadowless Shadow

From “LOCK DOWN IMPROMPTKU”

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