"Name名" by Zheng Yu
🎵
Under a red, snapping sun, my 外公 went searching for
crowns, integrity, variations of clouds or
any character that he saw hopeful and sweet in a dictionary
to come up with the perfect name for his first granddaughter
What he found:
铮: iron bones.
杨: white poplar. 外公 said that its leaves bit off the front legs of a tornado.
长歌: to sing a long song.
筝---
this became my name. Too few characters to be remembered about 筝,
meaning the “kite:” a toy that is not ironic enough, not white enough,
not even musical enough to be beaming with the weight of
welkin, grove, waters and birds, a world accumulates into her wrinkles.
I massage my face every day and night to preserve a presentation
as smooth as possible--for as long as I can.
外公 gave up on reading last year. Too many characters he could no longer recall;
His ceremonious collection wore out years ago.
I hold onto those crisp pages as tightly as he holds onto my thread.
Perfection is loose and far, though;
Have you ever, 外公, dreamed of a land where the best stories
can be titled with soft easy names near at hand?
🎵🎵
I saw crown
reunion
a cloud changing her ethereal face
in the hope that
you were born at midday
into a dictionary of good things
and I felt I could never be careful enough
In making this decision:
that one of them would have the heart to
become your tree sailor, guard you from
an iron skeleton of time, sing you the reasons
behind our ancestors’ trudge
when all that’s familiar is about to be powdered
melted away
fastened to the wall of a red brick house of which
you will be learning your way out, as if
Kite: a thousand years’ remembrance
of peasants praying to a springtime waterfowl
like children. Even life shall be briefer than your string
Even
Sink
Even I
Even
I
Pages and pages and pages later
you feel you can never be careful enough in making this decision:
to write a poem about me. But until then a velvet love
is all I age into; after which, I will be folded into your dictionary
& come to be your softest word
Between this and that
I see kite
made from bamboo branches
landing on a big-eyed creature to record,
with her rumination,
Your birth.
Zheng (Alex) Yu is a poet and translator. Born and raised in Changsha, China, she received her B.A. from the College of William and Mary, where her works have been awarded the Concord Traveling Scholarship and the David C. Jenkins Memorial Scholarship for Poetry. She recently completed her M.A. in Humanities from the University of Chicago. Being the first female in her family to receive college-level education, Zheng believes that to find and hold onto her own literary voice is to recover the lost echoes of her female ancestors: "I witness solidarity among females across time and space being realized as our traumas relate to, while empowering, one another’s confession in an intertextual space."
