Xiang Ming (Hsiang Ming) (“toward light”) is the pen name of Dong Ping, who came from Changsha, Hunan Province. In 1944 the spreading War of Resistance against Japanese invasion drove him out of his hometown, and in 1945 he enrolled in Central Air Security Academy in Guiyang, Guizhou Province. In 1949 he moved to Taiwan with the military, from which he was honorably discharged as a colonel in 1984. After a brief stint as an electrical engineer, he worked as an editor for various newspapers and journals.
Xiang Ming started writing poetry in 1951, studied with Qin Zihao in 1953, and published his first collection in 1959, followed by five more over the decades. He served as the chief editor of the Blue Star Poetry Journal from 1985 to 1992 and cofounded the Taiwan Poetics Quarterly in 1992. In addition to poetry, he has published prose and children’s stories.
I take a deep breath in the rose-colored light of early morning
How close they seem: the foothills of Dadun Mountains
I don’t dare to look up
To look up and touch the metallic clouds
Stretching out the right hand
Is the Pacific, a huge slice of thin silver
When you stretch out, by chance,
You scoop up a lens of aquamarine
Leading toward the west; how much the West is weighed down
The dense clouds over the isthmus are brewing up the dawn
You can’t see any farther
Beyond that, in the distance, only nightmares
Now, we are just beginning to read the sea
Now, the sea is instructing us
Not until you have thoroughly read one page of the early dawn
Can you greet the day’s schedule, spry and happy.
(1962)
(translated by Eugene Eoyang)
You are the kind of tumor
That lurks deep inside the body
That one wants to get rid of once and for all
A kind of terminal disease
That’s prolonged and incurable
Except in ashes and death
You’re definitely allergic to more than pollen
Between summer and fall
When the cicada casts off its coil
You go into a spasm
Besides, you’re as stubborn as a callus on the hand
Peel off one layer
And another
Is already incubating.
I absorb the quintessences of Nature
You suck them out of me
I hold lightning in my mouth
But you roar out the thunder
My breast seethes fire
You turn it into a lamp
In the end, all you want is
To make me as thin as the thinnest paper
On the paper whatever it is
The days and months have swept past
In the end suddenly welling up in tears, and letting out a shriek—
This becomes a poem.
(1975)
(translated by Eugene Eoyang)
You are a growth of ivy, made scraggly by wind and soil that’s fallow
With the kind of fragility that causes worry
When the electric guitar next door makes a racket
Yet you, surprisingly, are not accustomed to using your ears
You reach out multitudinous
Grasping palms
Using broken tiles as your home
Using antitheft windows as a ladder
With red trumpetlike flowers blaring out
Upward
Upward
Yet, incredibly, you do not know
Upstairs it’s the fourth floor
Even though the moon is setting
It glows over the ancient horizon
(1977)
(translated by Eugene Eoyang)
Before it can cry out in pain
That setting sun hovers in mid-air over Manila Bay
Hurried by the twilight
Leaps into the sharp knife edge slicing sky from sea
From the shore, lined with coconut trees
Blood hot as fire
Boiling all of Manila Bay
Into a deep beet red
How majestic an ending
I think of a common sight by the roadside
Filipinos wielding machetes
Their knife edges almost as keen
At once chopping down to roll on the ground,
One after another, coconuts as ripe as the setting sun
Indeed, they were also cut down so suddenly
They didn’t have time to cry out in pain
(1987)
(translated by Eugene Eoyang)
Evening approaches; it’s about to snow
It’s possible that the flock of geese will stop honking
Filth as far as the eye can see
It’s possible that, for the moment, we can cover things up
We pile up a snowman
It’s possible my eyes see him melt, like tears, into a pool of dead water
Three loud roars
At the front of the eaves
Icicles almost breaking off or about to break
Resonating to the sounds and falling down
It’s possible that they will disintegrate or shatter
If
Going down the road we can track
And hunt down
Three or five fugitive verses
For a volume of peppermint-flavored
Late Tang poetry titled Clearing After Snow
Why not? Nothing’s
Impossible.
(1991)
(translated by Eugene Eoyang)
Early, very early, there was a dream
A steel hoop looped in a circle barely a foot across,
Guided by a short bamboo stick
Perfectly straight and smooth;
Chasing agile childhood,
Rolling until it wobbles off by itself, on none other
Than the tortuous pebble-strewn paths by the old houses
The forlorn wooden bridge trembles and shakes when walked on
So unsettling and dangerous
The pace of the feet and the torque in the wrist
Excited and interested
It’s as good as Mom’s cooking
We never get tired
When the hoop slips out of one hand
I catch it with the other to maintain the momentum
As if the entire globe
Were just this hoop creeping around at my feet
Steady now, let me
Hurry it on along.
(1991)
(translated by Eugene Eoyang)