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.

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