Two Poems

by Yuan Changming



 My Crows

 Like billions of dark butterflies 
 Beating their wings 
 Against nightmares; rather
 Like myriads of 
 Spirited coal-flakes 
 Spread from the sky 
 Of another world
 A heavy black snow 
 Falls, falling, fallen 
 Down towards the horizon 
 Of my mind, where a little crow
 White as a lost patch
 Of autumn fog
 Is trying to fly, flapping  
 From bough to bough  

  Snowflaking

 In the wild open west, snow flakes keep falling
 Like myriad baby angels knocked down from Paradise 
  
     Blurring the landscape behind the vision
 Hunting each consonant trying to rise above
  
 The ground. The day is brighter, lighter &
    Softer than the feel. Soon there will be
  
       Dirty prints leading to everywhere (or nowhere)
 & no one will care how the whole world will collapse
         In blasphemy. The missing cat won’t come to 
        Trespass the lawn, nor will the daffodil bloom
  
To catch a flake drifting astray. Nobody bothers even to think    
  About where the season is held up on its way back, how 
          The fishes are agitating under the pressure of wintry 
          Water, why people wish to see more and more snow