Every port is open to the universe. We accept submissions of poetry to Herb Port of Poets from anywhere in the world. As a rule, all the submitted poems will appear in this blog. For guidelines, please click the link below.
Walk beyond the farthest mountain
I walk slowly holding a small thing,
Watching ears of pampas grasses waving,
A tiny butterfly dancing around leopard plants,
Whiskers of polygonum sparkling in the morning light.
Look, here
Is where you lay,
Eating your time,
Belly on the ground,
Listening to the words of earth,
Not sleeping,
Just pretending to sleep.
Peace is ...
Two elder girls were picking flowers
On the paths in a large rice field.
One girl had pink flowers,
The other had yellow ones.
The rice field was so large,
But there seemed to be no flowers,
I looked around but could not find any.
Far away were seen a row of mountains.
And this rice field was like a fantasy world.
I tried hard to find flowers in vain.
fledglings
below the precipice sprawls despair, and at the precarity of peering in
they hold the mournful meaning, send a glance, the corpse’s froth meanly menacing
a directly descending beak, overbearing
into the bottomless darkness, it cut across my field of vision
dragged forth by the hair, my disappointment becomes known
both legs thrust out, the electronic sound rings endlessly
if i start walking, the compass of my self-restraint runs wild
you, listening to the treble tones of birds at the harbor
Indomitable silences
Indomitable
silences
dream
embossed
consciousness
ascending
close
to the adobe temple
Inome
There’s a boar
trapped in my left chest.
Its eyes shine through the slits between my ribs,
and sometimes it tramples my diaphragm
with its hard hooves.
I’d love to let it run free,
but if it charges out blindly and hurts someone...
that’s the last thing I want.
So I keep it here, caged but still breathing.
Let’s talk Tapestry
But
don’t expect anything too literal –
neither restoration nor reconstruction
I use vocabulary to maintain a link.
I want to play –
to evoke not describe,
nor illustrate
Quiet
A winter shrouded in a years‐long gap of jet‐black heaviness
On slightly withered evergreens and
On completely bare deciduous trees
A light snow falls equally
A light snow melts
Like the purity of the dripping droplets
A trace of weariness resided in an earnest face
There was a time of reconciliation
That Person Came Back but I Was Not There
I should have waited for that person then.
As a roe deer glances back when it crosses a hill,
just for a moment I should have stood and waited there,
if it were night I should have waited for dawn.
if it were winter, I should have waited for spring.
Like a bear waiting for a salmon.
A Man Who Forgot how to Love
Not earning tomorrow‘s rice, the price of rice rose like bubbles.
News of suicide bombers piled up like tax bills.
Not knowing the laundry shop, people stricken by poverty who committed suicide easily disappeared.
With so much forgetting, we forget history, forget how to kiss,
forget how to love, become workholics.
A man who forgot how to love passed by a woman who had forgotten sex.
Answering Trivial Questions
One day when I was twenty-eight years old
a man calling himself a Marxist came to ask me to join a new organization.
Near the end of the meeting, after some talking, he asked:
By the way, from which university did you graduate, comrade Song?
Smiling,I answered, high school was the end of my education.
I graduated from juvenile detention and have been a labourer ever since.
