Poetry was a great passion for me in high school. I served on the Lowell High School Literary Magazine Myriad from 1980-1983 and wrote many poems (of which only a few were actually accepted).
I imagined myself as a poet somewhere between T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams. But the truth is I have not looked at these poems for years. Here are a few selections. It was hard to resist the temptation to edit these poems after all those years, but I did.
Sadly I have not written any poems in recently in English and only one in Chinese about five years ago.
Emanuel’s Poems
Genesis
In the beginning
God said, “Let there be light.”
And there was light
But the darkness lingered on.
And man was born of death
And rose from the darkness of childhood
To carry a club
Of gnarled wood.
And he howled into the wind
Of anger and suffering
And hated his world and his God.
And God said, “It is good.”
And on the last day,
God rested, and man
Suffered in an indifferent world.
And cursed his god,
And loved his god,
And made his god
In his own image.
Strawberries
Standing under the open window
Freshly cleaned, before I awoke,
A bowl of strawberries
Moist and fresh
But tasting of standing
With the dark crusted bread
And the wilted green lettuce
Overnight in the pantry
From yesterday
At the market, in the brilliant rain.
Mortality
Death comes to me slowly
As the morning sun
Of restless afternoons.
Lo, I grow painfully aware
Of the fate of children
And crumbling cathedrals.
I see death in tulips
And evil in the simplest gesture.
Yet I cannot look away.
(untitled)
I am as best I can
I would be more than what I am.
I would have sacrificed everything
But I have nothing to lose.
I am a brave and worldly man
Who is weak and afraid
And fears suffering more than death.
Should I suffer without reason
Or reason without suffering?
Without reason,
I am a distant spectator
Distant as the planets
In eternal motion.
(untitled)
It was not that I was tired.
I had slept well.
It was not that I was old.
I was just a child.
I lay in bed and it came
Not from the dark and evil places
As one might think,
But from the passing of time
That takes up life,
That makes up life.
An ominous specter
Coming from the very thing
That is existence.
The subtle discontentment
That has no origin
That creeps up
And appears from nowhere.
Elegant Afternoons
Elegant afternoons
When the cat slept
On the sun-coated
Quilted couch.
Sitting in the library
Reading the first pages
Of yellowed books.
And then having tired,
I dozed in the warmth
That penetrated
The leaded glass panes
Over the faded flowers
Wilting in a Chinese vase.
Car Crash I
A car crash
With scattered people
Suffering.
Everyone turned,
Craning necks
As if to see
Misery.
As if their own lives
Were not miserable enough.
Car Crash II
The world shattered
In just a second
What was is gone
And cold reality
Sets in around me
And the pain
But mostly the shock
And the hands that try to help
When I want to die
And the pieces of the car
And the blood
And the sickness
And the blackness
And the sleep.
A Ruin
The cool mist
Coated the valley,
Made less harsh
The battlements
And more rustic
The cannons.
The sun pierced
The clouds
And woke the lizards
To climb on
The towers of stone.
One could forget
That ugly past.