Poetry

to us in early winter

Courtesy of Austin Pena - Equipo Media/Flickr (CC BY 2.0 DEED).

by Dong Li |

when it is time
the sun sets pink on the birch
and it will be winter
we are no stranger than we were
gingered joy will have melted after
icicles give way to early lilacs
and the touch against forgetting
comes to an end as it did before the window
that we have looked through together
for those long nights of atonement

Dong Li is a multilingual author who translates from Chinese, English, French, and German. He is the English translator of The Gleaner Song by the Chinese poet Song Lin, and The Wild Great Wall by the Chinese poet Zhu Zhu. His debut collection of poetry, The Orange Tree was the inaugural winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize.
Part of the Poetry Curator Series, this poem was selected by November poetry curator Cynthia Greenlee, who reads the poem with a “faint sense of wonder seasoned with guilt; I’ve slandered winter as the least of seasons or, more to the point, my least favorite. I’m prejudiced in favor of spring and summer’s riotous greens and bounty. But winter has its own blossoms and beauties. Dong’s poem made me pause and take stock of the easiness of sun loving and the cyclical yearning to emerge into a new season, budding with life.”
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