I Have Neither Killed My Enemies Nor Loved My Love: Four Poems by Wu Chenjun
3 min read
The Beetle
I have turned into a beetle
(the kind Kafka wrote about)
I crawl through a heap of rubbish
I rage, but it does no good
There is too much rubbish
My skinny arms and legs
cannot get me out of these mountains,
plains and oceans of rubbish
When I am hungry, I eat rubbish
There is no other food
to be found. I coexist with rubbish culture,
rubbish ideas, a rubbish order
A good thing I have become a beetle
I will not die just yet
The bacteria in my body happen to kill
the bacteria in the rubbish. One day,
while eating rubbish, I come across a female beetle
wearing lipstick. She
looks at me, and I look at her
With rubbish in my mouth, I crawl past her
Here in the rubbish desert, I have no desire
to talk to her
I like female beetles
who do not wear lipstick.
Xu Shu
I wake in the morning. God has granted me another day.
I can walk circles round the community. I can
read and write. By night, when I am exhausted
and have to go to bed, I realise
I have wasted the day. I have created nothing,
nor cultivated my mind or character. I have neither killed my enemies
nor loved my love. Just as the system intended,
I have become an atom scattered somewhere in China.
I give the system no service, but the system has also stripped me
of the ability to resist. I am Xu Shu
—a man I like from the Three Kingdoms.
Life is utterly empty. Every morning
I dream the dream of being awake; every night,
as if my soul had left me, I crawl into a dream within a dream.
An Evening of Our Times
The old men and women have all gone to sleep
They have spent the day fighting Omicron
and are worn out. Early this morning,
while I was still in bed, I heard
the old men and women shouting outside my window:
Time for a COVID test
I ignored them. Then they shouted:
The community is locked down, locked down!
Fighting off sleep, I ran downstairs
Sure enough, I could no longer leave the community
Some people in white, some tables
had appeared on the community to give us COVID tests
I went to the little shop and bought ten packs of cigarettes
My initial plan was to be locked down for ten days
The old men and women gathered
in group after group to discuss the outbreaks
in Wuhan and Shanghai over the past few years
Their faces were both animated and bewildered
All day they talked about Omicron
Now they have returned to their nests to sleep
I sit alone on an empty bench
watching a black cat walk beneath a streetlamp
A woman in grey runs through the shadows
Suddenly I am a prisoner, on this
evening of our times. Everything is changing
yet everything seems unchanged
It is not cold tonight. I want to sit here a few more hours
I read poems by a psychiatric patient
He writes well. His name is Walser
He says, I can only tremble with fear
Night Tree
Eyes closed, I sit beneath the night tree
feeling the cool breeze
chewing on time’s bitterness
I could be young again
in my parents’ courtyard
sunk in an old rattan chair
absorbed
under an incandescent bulb
in a love story
No one urges me to go to bed
The night is my companion
In the stillness I let my mind roam
to faraway Spain to admire
a nun’s beauty
Back then, time was still my friend
It flirted with me
Now it only wears down my will
I sit in a night that feels like a counterfeit
The joy of youth is beyond me now
Night trees rustle
as though mocking my age
Author: Wu Chenjun (吳晨駿) was born in 1966 and graduated from the Department of Power Engineering at Southeast University in China in 1989. He currently lives in Nanjing. His published works include short story collections (《明朝書生》《我的妹妹》《柔軟的心》《對一個人我們了解多少》), a poetry collection (《棉花小球》), and a novel (《筋疲力盡》).
Translator: Xi Nan (西楠) is a writer and translator working in English, Spanish and Chinese. Her own work explores memory, time, displacement and the complexities of human relationships, often drawing on everyday life and personal experience. She currently lives in England with her husband Fish Lu.