Boston Harbor, Dawn as Dusk

 

Zhu Xiao Di

 

 

 

 

You constantly come to my dream

Interrupting my sleep—a gong rattles

In front of your Magistrate’s courtyard

Bringing cases for you, not for me, to solve

 

I live by Boston Harbor, thirteen hundred

Years away, fleeting over the Atlantic

Neither dressed up in embroidered brocade

Nor having the company of three wives

 

Yet you are beside me, blessed with your wit

We are in one, before day claims its sovereignty

I have the entire country, nay, the whole world

Hanging on my ballot, while sirens sing stealthily

 

O your hands within my hands, sleeves of murmur

Lumber along the wharves, soft pillow beneath my neck

The fog-darkling harbor, ask for nothing but the sunbreak

I woke up, thinking of your Magistrate, the beloved Judge Dee

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Zhu Xiao Di is the author of Thirty Years in a Red House (a memoir), Tales of Judge Dee (a novel), Leisure Thoughts on Idle Books (essays in Chinese), and poems at [Alternate Route], Assignment, Blue Unicorn, E·ratio, Eunoia Review, MSU Roadrunner Review, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, The Beatnik Cowboy, The Crank and WestWard Quarterly, as well as Heathentide Orphans 2024.  He contributes to Father: Famous Writers Celebrate the Bond Between Father and Child (an anthology). 

 

 


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