🌼 poems that held my hand in may 🌼

Nocturne, Li-Young Lee

Your Name, Vahan Tekeyan

Sonnets to Orpheus 2;29, Rainer Maria Rilke

I stopped going to therapy, Clementine von Radics

Miyazaki Bloom, Nina Mingya Powles  

The Quiet Machine, Ada Limón

When we two parted, Lord Byron

Fragment, Amy Lowell

The Want of You, Angelina Weld Grimké

When Did It Happen?, Mary Oliver

Alone, Sara Teasdale

Peace XVIII, Khalil Gibran

Magnolia, Nina Mingya Powles

Cha chaan teng means ‘tea restaurant’ in Cantonese (cha canting in Mandarin) but these places are much more than that. There is one in Shanghai, hidden on a quiet street that splits off from chaotic Huahai Zhong Lu. The neon sign hanging in the window, “茶餐厅”, spills pink and green light onto the wet pavement. There is always a queue, and you will always have to share a small table with people you don’t know. The walls are a pale greenish-brown, with retro screens of yellow and blue glass tiles separating smokers from the non-smokers. It’s like stepping into Chungking Express, Wong Kar Wai’s film set in 1990s Hong Kong, with its cool palette of jade green and soft aquamarine. When I first saw the film I recognised the colours instantly, and the way the characters always seemed to be looking at each other through a haze of steam and city smog. At the back of the restaurant, where plates of food arrive clattering from the kitchen onto steel counters, the shelves are stacked with tins of condensed milk, Bovril, soup and packets of instant noodles. The menu is what you might call ‘Canto-Western’ or, as it’s known colloquially, ‘soy sauce Western food’. When Hong Kong was a British colony, cha chaan tengs emerged as a cheap option for those wanting Western food, which was usually only available at high-end restaurants. As a result, here are all the wondrous comfort foods of my childhood somehow listed on a single menu: fried noodles and fried rice, soy sauce chicken and roast goose, pork buns and fried wontons, along with spaghetti, macaroni, tinned soup, corned beef, sandwiches and toast of all kinds. Peanut butter toast, sugar toast, condensed milk toast, and Hong Kong-style deep-fried French toast.

—Nina Mingya Powles, Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai

Small bodies of water by Nina Mingya Powles

Princess Mononoke unwraps her white shawl,

folds it with both hands, drapes it over the back

of her chair. She lifts the apron over her head,

double-knots the string around her waist.

She grasps the knife the way her mother did,

cold hilt against her wrist. Outside, soft

scratchings of dusk have begun.

She slices leeks

lengthways along the stem, the edges curl.

She crushes garlic with her fist, licks the juice

from her palm, unpeels knots of ginger,

cuts skinned cores into quarters. The forest

darkens as she lifts the heart from its

bloodied wrappings, holds it in her hand,

considers its wet weight. It reminds her

of the inside of her daughter’s mouth.

She can feel a kind of murmuring

coming from the heart, or from

her chest or the walls of this house.

Through the window

the forest comes closer

and waits.

Nina Mingya Powles, “Wolfgirl,” in Magnolia 木蘭.

I have to translate five poems for my portfolio and I picked Nina Mingya Powles because I really vibe with the way she talks about home and heritage and language but I'm also neither from Aotearoa nor Malaysian-Chinese so there's just a lot of research involved in this translation but I also really just want to get the feeling right.

'That was racist,' I say into the air, into the circle. My voice is calm. For a moment my voice is present among the others' voices, and then it isn't anymore. If anyone else in the room has heard me, they don't make a sign. The room cannot hold on to my words for too long or else it might go up in flames. The room cannot hold on to me.

— Small bodies of water, Nina Mingya Powles

'Home is not a place but a collection of things that have fallen or been left behind'

- nina mingya powles, from small bodies of water

Afterwards, I couldn't avoid passing by these places, but when I walked past I sped up. Especially at night, when there was a risk of dreams pouring in.

- Nina Mingya Powles, Small Bodies of Water

from the essay “Falling City”

“April kōwhai” - Nina Mingya Powles

When the April heatwave came, my mum sent a WeChat video from Malaysia of an evening downpour. You can’t see the rain, only the effects of it: a gasp from her mouth and a yellow flame tree reflected in the wet, shaking.

/

I see a yellow blur from far away and walk closer, disbelieving. Here is a kōwhai tree on the edge of a garden in North London, in full bloom. For a moment I do not breathe air, I breathe yellow, I breathe myself home.

/

My phone is vibrating, telling me: You have a new memory. Here is a stream of pictures collected into an album, all taken somewhere far away. Home is not a place but a string of colours threaded together and knotted at one end.

/

Kōanga, springtime, often synonymous with kōwhai, yellow. In another time and place, I watch the hills above the house turn gold.

/

When people say things like the hottest April day in sixty years it becomes necessary to make note of the bright heat of the concrete, the fallen magnolias with their shy blood roots, the fingernail kōwhai blooms curling translucently like discarded chrysalids. Be still. You have a new memory.

/

Ua kōwhai, light spring showers, or: kōwhai showers — when the world becomes a sea of yellow. I now know it can happen anywhere, even somewhere cold.

/

In her childhood bedroom my mum slides back the mosquito net and holds her phone against windowpane, recording the rain.

In the end we are humanlike: Blade Runner 2049, Nina Mingya Powles

Magnolia, Nina Mingya Powles

女 (woman, feminine): I see a curved standstill / a breath being held in /

It is tiring to be a woman who loves to eat in a society where hunger is something not to be satisfied but controlled. Where a long history of female hunger is associated with shame and madness. The body must be punished for every misstep; for every “indulgence” the balance of control must be restored. To enjoy food as a young woman, to opt out every day from the guilt expected of me, is a radical act, of love. My body often feels like it’s neither here nor there. Too much like this, not enough like that. But however it looks, my body allows me to feel hunger.

—Nina Mingya Powles, Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai

— Small bodies of water, Nina Mingya Powles

"Home has always been complicated…" #ReadIndies @TheEmmaPress

Having got on so well with a novella for my first #ReadIndies book, I thought it would be nice to keep going with slimmer volumes, especially as I have so many in the pile of possibles and on Mount TBR! So my second book of the month is a recent arrival, one of two from the publishers The Emma Press which were a Christmas gift from lovely blogger HeavenAli. Both of these looked marvellous, but in…

View On WordPress