You glared down on the streams of metallic tears overflowing;
blotches of ocherous torchlight fluttering
against cannons of blinding blue
Do not ask, “Where were we?”
Below us oceans of blue bleed
into the sky
The tip of an iceberg lying afar
melts away the nerve endings of our brains
Freckles of light
blotted out
and broke out again
“Were you taking a flight to somewhere
or taking flight from somewhere?”
You wish you were back in those hexagonal rooms
filled with infinite books of old poems
which had seen all wars and calamities
Fractured and stained
restored in virtual bookstores
Butt-ends of our past are replicated
in echoes of muffled voices
“Would the shrouded forgone and forgotten
uncover or cover up
this chapter of our history?”
“No, those rooms never existed”
Only odds and ends could fill a room
Luggages of stories vagabond
crossing date lines, class lines, national lines
Passports are scattered and lost in
shibboleths from some yellow flyers years ago
drown in red history textbooks
Exiled forever outside a map
You imagine the bodies on the tall Pillar making room for
more homeless spirits
Your torn and twisted hands
whittled by abrasive mainlands
Castaway loose ends forever adrift
entangled with
flags at the ends of lands with fences
A prism of lights
converged
and dispersed again
into an abysmal blue
Clouds are shedding showers of scales
flake
by flake
falling faintly upon those floating farther
A motley of place markers
missed and etherized upon the colourful map you’re holding
embroiders and stretches the edges of flags
Interstices of lines from our beloved poems
seep into polychrome altitudes contouring
intonations of our first dialogues in second languages
Between furrows of mountains
we found the spot of freckles on the other side of the globe
“Keep the patch if you must”
we will sew and suture with a strand of hair
our very own niche of fabric
Flakes of cloud-scales
fluttering
into patches of terrains unseen
Astray, thoughts
fume in ashtrays of “bye-byes” and rhymes gone awry
all over the map and nowhere
We repack to repatch our map
“nei1 dou6” replacing “go2 dou6”
Old stitches removed
untangled loose ends pick up new beginnings
centers and borders meet halfway
Above vastness of blue there flashes
a string of floating signs
Gleams of afterglow
dribble on the back of our islands
望下去看見金屬的溶液流瀉
銀色光點滾動
越過銀白的光脈
我們是在哪裡?
下面是藍色的海洋
還是天空?
遠處是雪山的尖頂
還是某人腦袋裡的神經末梢?
光點
隱沒了
又浮現出來
你正在飛去一個地方
還是飛離一個地方?
我想回到一個房間
那裡放滿舊詩集
經歷戰火和雜亂
撕破了封底,塗花了
又在舊書店撿到
那些影印回來的舊資料
那些沙啞的錄音帶
記下了一些逝去的聲音
可以幫助我
重寫一段新詩的歷史
不 , 這樣的房間從未存在過
雜物堆積起來
盛載資料的紙箱在流浪
越過了不同的海岸線
書籍散失了
幾十年前某個詩人飄零的句子
從未結集成書
永遠在人們畫定的地圖外流浪
我只能想像一所巨廈
讓所有的幽靈棲息
我以殘損的手掌
撫過明昧的中原
撿拾那些散落在外的線團
扯起來
拆開了人們努力捍衛的邊界
一點光
凝聚
又消失
在廣大的藍色裡
魚鱗似的雲
一片
一片
把實在的地形翻成更寬敞的地圖
因為不同的點上
有我記掛的人
越過了疆界和旗幟
遇到一首喜愛的詩
在不同顏色的等高線裡
我們開始說話
跨過高山
我看見世界的另一顆痣
不管人們為一塊補丁吵架
把一根頭髮納入
自己的版圖
片片魚鱗的雲
飄散
離開我們視線之外
四散的思緒
我們懷念的人和詩
飄到各處
我們在心裡不斷重畫已有的地圖
移換不同的中心與邊緣
拆去舊界
自由遷徙來往
建立本來沒有的關連
廣漠中偶然閃過
一些游離的訊息
在浮泛的光幕底下
逐漸晃現了陸地的影子Choi Yan Ying Daphne has recently begun writing poetry amidst her city’s inexorable metamorphosis, exploring the dialectical relationship between alienation and rootedness in a Hong Kong grown uncannily foreign. This marks her poetry debut, with her second piece forthcoming in Voice and Verse Poetry Magazine. When not writing, she teaches English as a lecturer at Saint Francis University.
 | A guest post by
|