[archivied]: Natural Confrontations: A Group Poem by CY

The following is a group of poems all titled 'Natural Confrontations,' which have been published online or in print by various journals in the past couple of years: 

1.Crow

A baby raven

Popping up from nowhere

Tries to

Establish itself:
one dark truth
On the skeletal tree top
Yawing fiercely
Towards the sky, the wind, the buildings
The fields and the entire afternoon
All so fluffily white
In jade-toned snow

2. Seagull 

As if right from heaven

A snowy seagull charges down

Trying to pick up the entire ocean

With its bold beak

As the tsunami raises

All its fierce fists

In sweeping protection 

Against earth’s agitation

In foamy darkness

3. Plum Blossom

Without a single leaf

Grass-dyed or sun-painted

To highlight it  

But on a skeletal twig

Glazed with dark elegies  

A bud is blooming, bold and blatant

Like a drop of blood

As if to show off, to challenge

The entire season

When whims and wishes

Are all frozen like the landscape

4. Eddy  

A gossamer-like breeze 

Left far behind

By a running dog

Tries to strike

The stagnated twilight

Hanging above the whole city

Before the storm sets in

5. Bamboo 

From under

A bulky boulder

Sitting still, meditating

Like a Buddha

A tiny bamboo sprout

Has just broken the earth

Ready to shoot up

Against the entire sky

6. Grass

Inspired by spring’s spirit

You turn all your life

Into a pair of green swords

No matter how many times

Your head and heart

Are both trodden 

You still hold them high

Against the summer sky

7. Leaf

Like a wounded soldier

Firmly holding his position

You are the only one

Still hanging there

To blockade the invasion

Of a whole cold season

8. Firefly

Burst with courage

You are flying around, using

Your little light

Like a sharp scissor tip

To rip off the heavy curtain

Of all the darkness

Blown out of frenzy dreams

9. Cloud

Your body so light

Soft, short, never

Even having a fixed shape

Yet you resist the strongest

Summer sun, trying to

Shield every ray it shoots down

Towards the huge empire 

Getting increasing hot on earth

10. Octopus  

To escape

From your predator

You eject the ink out of

Your little body

As if to dye the whole ocean

Into thick night  

11. Orchid

Deep in the valley

Alone on a shady spot

You bloom aloud, though

There are neither eyes

Nor ears open nearby

Paying the slightest attention

To your shape or melody

Be it ever so fragrant

So fulfilling 

12. Lotus

           

From foul, decayed silt

At the very bottom

Of a big lake of dirty murk

You shoot clean

Against the morning sun

Always pure

Crystal

Unpollutable

13. Corn

With a small body

Of teeth, you have bitten off

Every golden minute

From the warm day

Hoping to collect and store

All the sunlight

Of the passing season  

14. Cuckoo

With a thin

Blood-throated voice

You call out aloud

Trying to wake up

Millions of millions

Of trees and rocks

All deeply lost in

Their cold dreams

Of last winter

15. Ant

Stretching its hair-like limbs

As far as it can

The ant embracing

The tallest Douglas tree

In the forest

Attempts to shake off

All its leaves

Branches, and even

To uproot it

16. Vortex

Turning, twirling

In ever smaller circles

A vortex in the stream

Seems to be sucking in

All the waters on earth

Like the black hole 

Trying to swallow

The whole universe

17. Feather

A white fluffy plume

From an unknown bird

Happening to fly by

Drifts around, falling down

Slowly, as if to wipe out

All the dust at dusk

With its invisible fingers

18. Squirrel

Dripping along

From its freshest wound

A squirrel runs zigzag

Across a forlorn field

As if to melt

All the ice

In the valley, or

To warm up

The hardened heart of the winter

19. Meteorite

With a resolution

Harder than a diamond

You burn yourself up

As your strike down from high above

Trying to warm up

The entire universe, even

At the cost of your own life

Short, but like a prolonged exclamation mark

Changming Yuan: Outbursts (3)

born in 1957, i used to feel too mentally old and too physically young for my age, but now i am feeling otherwise. i never keep a diary, but today i want to have an online journal entry to record an important night in my life.

since i went to bed around 11:30 last night, i have been burning with thinkings and, as a result, i did not get any sleep. i have had most of these ideas for quite a long time, but they haunted me so badly last night that i feel the need to release my outburst now:

- i hit upon / developed a lot of publication initiatives, intellectually:
1. east-west / sino-america / english-chinese review, a yearly online publication to begin with. a non-gov't, non-profit journal, with editorial focuses on cross-cultural issues such as political, military, cultural, diplomatic, economic, literary and folk topics;
2. w w / www yearbook. an annual online publication to start with, focusing on human wisdom;
3. poetry pacific press / pp press / yuans press. a publishing house to publish poetry online first, then chapbooks, full-length collections, and other genres of literature;
4. changming yuan, a blogsite publishing/archiving all my writings, even those to be translated from chinese into english or otherwise. currently, yuanspoetry does not seem to be fitting, esp since Allen is becoming less and less active poetically as he is to attend university, majoring in commerce. or perhaps i should just change yuanspoetry into changming yuan - my chinese pen name i used when i published my first academic essay and monograph in china in 1988.

besides, i found about 10 topics to write mini-essays about in chinese, to be posted on my chinese blogsite at creaders.net; also decided upon two sub-genres of 'found verse': 'last stanzas,' and 'newspaper poems';

- i reflected upon my health condition, physically:
since childhood, i have been suffering from many symptoms of a weak heart, with my heart muscle born to be deformed or abnormally thicker. hcm as it is called and known to me now, but nothing is really confirmed. short breath,  constant dizziness, more frequent nausea, chronicle fatigue, frequent insomnia - unfortunately, i have never met a good or helpful doctor, either in china or in canada.

from head to toe, i am having too many problems: a pair of poorly-focused eyes with a troubling weak vision, chronicle tmg, occasional toothache, neck problems, frequent stiff shoulders, chronicle back pain, stomach issue, bad prostate problem, etc; nothing seems to be really normally good;

- i thought about my inner reality, psychologically:
all my life, i have been suffering increasingly from unfair and often unbearable lack of luck, love, friendship, and understanding (not to mention appreciation and recognition). lonely, isolated and totally marginalized, i strongly feel i have been overdraft mentally as well as physically, always trying to challenging myself and push myself beyond my own limits. my family, esp my wife, has been treating me as a money-making machine - now i am 99% of such a machine. as a matter of fact, there are too many paradoxes about my life as a human being - i wrote a poem listing all such major paradoxes. for instance, i always love but seldom feel loved...

strangely, this time i did not cry my heart out, not even shed a single teardrop as i probably might have, being such an emotional and sensitive guy.

i still vividly remember my first two outbursts::
1. on the chinese new year's day in 1981, while still a graduate student at tianjin normal university, i cried my heart and soul out when i spent the cold evening alone on the entire campus, crying for nearly an hour over my loss of first love, my stress from studies, my feeling of loneliness and, in particular, my worries about my future or career;

2. on the rainy evening of 6 august 2004, while climbing all by myself a hill behind our hotel during our first and so far our only family tour (to banff, alberta), i burst into tears and almost cried myself to death, as i thought about all the hardships i had been suffering, and about the meaningless life i had been leading. that was the day i began to write and later to publish poetry in english;

indeed, i feel i am too mentally young and too physically old for my age now. i am aware i could theoretically die a sudden death anytime as result of a heart failure and, instead of fearing it, i actually anticipate and welcome it, although i do wish i could live another 10 years at least so that i could do some of the things i have wanted, to write, to publish, for instance.

as Keats wished once: o for another ten years, please...

Y, Y by Changming Yuan

yum-yum, you seem to
You are really haunted by this letter
as rich as old as the soil
yes, yes, with your yellowish skin
You seem obsessed with the first letter of the word
...
these are the first lines of a whole group of poems all titled 'y' - in fact i have no idea about exactly how many y-poems i have ever written and/or gotten accepted or published:  over a year ago, a computer motherboard crash caused me to lose all my files and  records, including those for my poetry subs and accepts, and this week, the upgrading and repairing of my computer has been making me undergo a similar disastrous experience.

that's why i often feel that the computer is more of a nuisance than of a convenience. modern hi-tech has made life both extremely convenient and troublesome.

other larger groups of poems that have exactly the same or similar titles are respectively:
'my crow'
'directory of destinies'
'directory of directions' 
'east idioms'
'natural confrontations'
...
as i mentioned in my interview with PANK, i have this bad habit of keeping writing poetry under the same title until i feel poetically exhausted. such habit has caused and will continue to cause much confusion and even trouble, but this is the way how sometimes my poetic inspirations work on me. for me, to write poetry and get it published is more important than anything else.

just in case i should have another computer crash in the future, i am recording this in my blog for archiving purposes - when i have time, i will try to find all my group poems and paste them here.

updates: pushcart nomination...

surfing randomly on the internet, i happened to notice a few minutes ago that "Kinship: for Yuan Hongqi" - one of my poems written in honor of my father, who died on 2 january 2012, was nominated by Mobius: The Poetry Magazine for the Pushcart Prize in 2012. what a little happy surprise! - for some reason, i have never received any notification to this effect. anyway, this is the fifth time my poetry has been nominated for the prize. for more details see http://www.mobiuspoetry.com/prizeawards.htm.

yesterday, i received 20 contributor's copies of my micro-chapbook titled Plein-Air [Paperback], published by Origami Poetry Project. the presentation, including the cover art, is so cute and so creative!  [link:: http://www.origamipoems.com/poets/180-changming-yuan].

recorded in the following are all changming's Pushcart nominations as of today::

1. "Kinship: for Yuan Hongqi." nominated by Mobius for a Pushcart Prize for 2012 [link:: http://www.mobiuspoetry.com/prizeawards.htm];

2. "SAWS: A Seasonal Poem," nominated by Wilderness House Literary Review for a Pushcart prize for 2011. [link:: http://www.fictionaut.com/forums/general/threads/1448];

3. "Word Collage: A Democratic Poem," nominated by Carcinogenic Poetry (Virgogray Press) for a Puschcart prize for 2010. [link:: http://virgograypress.com/2010/11/25/2010-virgogray-press-pushcart-prize-nominees/];

4. "S. E. W. N," nominated by Blue Fifth Review for a Pushcart Prize for 2009. [http://samofthetenthousandthings.blogspot.com/2009/11/bfrs-pushcart-nominations.html]. Also, originally published by BFR, my poem "Last Single Sale" was selected for inclusion in Best New Poems Online;

5. "Chansons of a Chinaman," nominated by my first poetry book publisher Leaf Garden Press for a Pushcart Prize for 2009. [link:: http://leafgardenpress.blogspot.com/]. - c
------------------------

on june 3, Allen passed his driver's road test early in the morning, and then as a family we went downtown to attend his graduation ceremony, where he received one thousand dollars of scholarship for community services.

in recent months, Allen has not been poetically active, but he did get 3 acceptances in may, and 1 in this month; tomorrow he is to write his last examination in high school , provincial english 12.