ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Emily Yin is a junior studying computer science at Princeton University. Her writing has been recognized by the UK Poetry Society and the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers. She currently serves as a poetry editor at Nassau Literary Review. Her work is published in or forthcoming from the Indiana Review Online, Pithead Chapel, decomP magazinE, and Rust + Moth, among others.
Too Many Bridges To Burn
Miles of farming roads, untouched by motorcycles
or cars. A bone white sky. Train stations swallowed
by dust. Here, seventy years ago, a young school teacher
was pummeled by the high-tide of Mao’s Revolution.
Here, sixty years ago, that teacher’s son forsook
his plow and picked up a rifle. When I asked him
why he enlisted, my grandfather
told me how his village was consumed by flames —
history books incinerated and Buddha statues scorched,
too many bridges to burn — how he wanted to extinguish the madness.
The army, my father says, gave him a soldier’s carriage
and a foreign land. In Taiwan, he laid down his arms
and wed a butcher’s daughter, had three bright-eyed sons.
Today, I’m here with my grandfather and father
to pay my respects to the ancestral grave. I catalogue animals
as we walk: two mutts, four oxen, six roosters.
Unsmiling villagers stare openly
at this girl who speaks their language with a Western lilt.
We reach a clearing cleaved by citrus trees. My grandfather
lights two candles with a steady hand, bows his head.
I know that he is remembering his parents,
all the burials he missed during that thirty-year exile
from his place of birth. The air is so still. Even the ravens
are silent today. I dip the joss stick, drunk on borrowed memory,
detached from time. I reverence unknown gods. Look out
on the green expanse, the empty roads and swollen fields,
imagine myself running barefoot through that sea of green
the way my grandfather had, the way I would have if he hadn’t
left. Sixty years ago, he followed a general
across the Formosa Strait, not knowing he’d return to find
his parents dead, his baby sister hunched with age. I wonder
If his mother watched him go. I wonder
If he ever looked back.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
