5 Poems by Yuan Changming

Valueless:  The Myth of Fair Price

Everything, everybody

Used to

    And still may have

A value; only

Only each has depreciated

Into a price

That keeps fluctuating

        violently

Against no value

Civilian Profiling: the Serial Terminator

A Caucasian man

Strong-bodied

Relatively young

Fond of wearing blue jeans

Driving a big-powered car

Who looks clean, attractive

Especially to pretty young girls

But has just undergone

Some pressure recently

His next target will be

A female chick of Chinese origin

  

Darkness vs Light

In deed

You had the darkest

Moment of

Last night

But you are all

The sunshine there is

This morning

Ascendance

Never are those ants-like creatures

Crawling to joint it – under low bushes

Across trails, at cracks, where

It occasionally dwells. All the tiny

Minds go up through the words like

Dust rising above trees, as the wind

Keeps blowing, and the ladder reaches

Higher against the Babel Tower

Disciples across the whole world  

Gather to approach Menfucius

And Menfucus approaches Confucius

And Confucius approaches Laozi, who

Is still trying hard, harder than Socrates

To find Tao above yin and yang

Circle:  A Geometric Poem

Rolling down from primitive mountains

Were stones, fruits, berries, trunks, together

With other roughly round shapes

To lakes, rivers, ponds, and pools where

Rain drops make disks as regularly round

As the sun, the moon and stars, until

The first wheel began to rotate

Like our planet – that was

More than eighty centuries ago

Ever since we have been moving

Up and down, faster and faster

With all others running

Outside our closed curve

Bionote 

Yuan Changming,  8-time Pushcart nominee and author of Mindscaping (2014) and Landscaping (2013), grew up in rural China, started to learn English at 19, and published several monographs before leaving China.  With a PhD in English, Yuan currently tutors in Vancouver, and co-edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Qing Yuan. Since mid-2005, Changming's poetry has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry (2014, 12, 09), BestNewPoemsOnline, Threepenny Review and 939 other literary journals/anthologies across 30 countries.