Winterscape: Crow vs Snow
Like billions of dark butterflies
Beating their wings
Against nightmares, rather
Like myriads of
Spirited coal-flakes
Spread from the sky
Of another world
A heavy black snow
Falls, falling, fallen
Down towards the horizon
Of my mind, where a little crow
White as a lost patch
Of autumn fog
Is trying hard to flap, flying
From bough to bough
Zeugmatic America: A Parallel Poem
Every time you stage a play or an election in your own yard
You cannot wait to shake hands with your audiences and their wealth
No matter whether it is the passage of a new bill or an old dilemma
You excel particularly at manipulating public will and private property
With your weeping eyes and hands
You keep waging war and peace far beyond your boundaries
While you kill non-Americans and their hope together
To turn all others and othernesses into biblical dust
More often than not, you selfish intentions prove
Much more destructive than your smart bombs
You invisible fighter jets strike far farther
Than your visible arms of peace effort
You are simply too great for a small criticism
Too super-powerful for a weak opposition
Too democratic for a totalitarian competition
And too single-minded for a double standard
Changming Yuan, author of Chansons of a Chinaman and 4-time Pushcart nominee, grew up in rural China and published several monographs before moving to North America. Currently Yuan teaches in Vancouver and has had poetry appearing in over 400 literary publications worldwide, including Barrow Street, Best Canadian Poetry, Best New Poems Online, Cortland Review, Exquisite Corpse and RHINO.
