Image: Unsplash, downloaded (https://unsplash.com/photos/lighted-orange-star-night-lamp-G1y7tcQxG34) 4. 2. 2024.
All the Stars that I Have Lost
All the stars that I have lost
Converge at the heart of these streets that looks like yours.
Red lights burst on from the hasty toaster jammed with traffic
whenever I am hereby reached.
Ladders on the pitch,
on which as cutouts people slouch,
as the next of the foliage line and dive,
and teeth of houses close upon their end.
Nightingales are nested tales.
Your gaze from me defocuses, and wicks the sun into a wicked smut,
and something collapses, centripetally.
A coquettish morning
packed with provisions
is drawing out clouds to mask its gobbles.
I could say so,
or I could not.
I could stop many times,
walking alone,
and shut my sight when coming upon strangers.
The sky is fading,
a colour of whitewashed old jeans.
A next spoon could only be clutched and a next bowl slurped when the last is
released,
when one arm is all that is left and had left.
Look how many bridges they have constructed
for a single stream through this brief metropolitan life.
The banks are vibrant with willows,
the ears with hollows.
It is windy. You have the wind
as much as you have other parleys to hold.
A dark feeling swells the soul,
as I tread upon time’s crowded arteries
I become the messenger of Time
with a magnet
somewhere inside me.
I would then never be lost.
If the sector stretches too ample my wings would thaw.
If the way bends and winds,
I would from it flutter and flee.
I would not linger,
regardless the light
somewhere you might have triggered.
I love the matte,
where no leaves glitter,
and no one is forced to glimpse the streaks
strained upon their eyes.
You are a past tense,
squatting inside the story,
keeking at the world from between the barring lines,
estranged,
the way you are foreign to yourself.
Inside your eyes there hides a light.
You open your eyes.
I turn and left.
I am blind to those homeward joys and sorrows,
and refrain from dwelling
on the wayward fact
that life is effortless,
but why a past there trowels,
slowly and hard.
About the Author: Helena Jiang is an undergraduate majoring in English Language and Literature at Shanghai International Studies University, China.
