Messengers

How apt it is that this upper pictogram could be an insect
the oracle bone drawing not tree but a bee’s exoskeleton
 
the first two upwardly curving strokes not branches
but forelegs| the second not twigs but middle legs
 
the downward arching lines not roots but hind limbs
How fitting that the lower images of a river and a boat
 
symbolise people pulling together to overcome a crisis
of even global proportions| Here on the steep tea terraces
 
I won’t tell the latest sickness or bereavement nor yet
the recent extinctions| I want to imitate the bees
 
to be an envoy of the visible to where there is neither a here
nor a beyond but the great unity| Soon they will fly out
 
from the workers’ box| brush yellow dust into tiny baskets
as they hum in the shrubs| pollinating sweet-scented flowers
 
I touch a pale tea bud| plump as a bumble bee’s abdomen
thinking about the side of life that is turned away from us
 
 
Wei Ji · Not Yet Fulfilled

 

By Sophie Song

Lucy Hamilton

First published in Tears in the Fence, No. 72, Autumn 2020. ISSN 0266-5816;
Winner of First Prize in the 2020 Second Light poetry competition and published in ARTEMISpoetry, Iss 25, November 2020. ISSN 2045-4686