David Wong Hsien Ming (b. 1988)
SELECTED POEMS
Potomac Tidal Basin
Washington DC, 2011
Splayed and pink a sparrow’s wing
caught in the shining grass.
Red in the middle of all that spring.
I kick leaves into a tomb
but she sees it still, and asks
what animal would discern one wing
from another. Not an animal then, I say.
Not an animal, but God himself.
Then God should have been cleaner!
she shouts, and is gone among the cherry trees.And I am left by the man-made lake,
the wind turning the branches and the blossoms
and the Washington Monument’s reflection
into quivering fingers that point at the dirt fact
of dead bird. The monument itself insists on sky,
on an old redemption now too tall and grand to save.
So I unearth the wing, dump it into the water.
The reflection crumbles for awhile
and is the same again. But the picture
is ruined by knowledge. Yes, God;
you could have been cleaner.
by David Wong Hsien Ming
from For the End Comes Reaching (2015)
