Sunflowers

A friend shared this poem with me and I want to pass it forward to greater readership.  I find this poem alluring: its language is internally tight, but offers the reader a powerful flexibility in interpretation.  The lack of information about the poem and the poet (futilely un-google-able) contribute to my impression that I am reading private secrets.

I was able to ascertain the following information about poet Yu Kwang-chung from an interview by KC Leung published in World Literature Today in 1991.  Yu Kwang-chung is an poet, essayist, translator, and critic born in Nanking, China, in 1928.  During the Civil War, Yu fled to Hong Kong with his family and settled in Taiwan in 1950.  Leung describes him as "Stylistically versatile, cosmopolitan, yet intensely Chinese, Yu writes on a wide variety of subjects, of which one stands out: the fate of China, an obsessive interest perhaps not unrelated to his life of many exiles.  More than anyone else, he has succeeded in fusing the classical tradition and modern poetics."

As I continue to broaden my poetic horizons, learning about gems like Yu Kwang-chung reminds me how much I still have to read.  I'm excited to learn more about him, his work in translation, and a genre of poetry I was previously unexposed to.

 

Sunflowers
by Yu Kwang-chung

The mallet raised in Christie’s room,
          Going,
          Going,
          Gone,
Comes thumping down.
So with thirty-nine million are bought
The tightened breaths in the room
And the bulging eyes in the world.
Yet forever beyond ransom
Is the ear that was sliced,
The red hair that was scorched,
The decayed teeth that went loose.
Forever sold are the thirty-seven years.
The mallet is raised at the excited crowd,
The pistol was raised at the lonely heart –


         Going, the sliced ear,
         Going, the scorched hair,
          Going, the decayed teeth,
         Going, the haunted dreams,
         Going, the fits of convulsions,
         Going, the letters and the diary,
         Going, the doctors and the sickbeds,
         Going, Dear Theo my brother –
And with a bang all, all was gone,
When the generous heart
Burst into sunflowers and flowering suns.