Just Some Unnatural Natural Things

Leaves
You should know that
Time can be folded like a piece of paper
And I have planted lives by simply putting
Seeds in the middle of the soil,
And fold it in half.
When I get tired of the task of gardening
I like to sit down by the window,
And watch how leaves die and return to us
From sunrise to sunset.

River
You should know that
Countries shut the doors to their children;
Denying their right to board the ark.
They said that time is like a river
But if this is true,
Then my river must have been frozen;
Paddles weighed down by ice;
And home becomes the horizon
That I can see but not reach
I started to understand the remorse
Of ancient Chinese poets
When they said that to exist in this world
Is to be forever a guest, a traveler of elsewhere;
“人生天地间，忽如远行客”
We are born between the sky and the earth,
In this world of eternity
But like the journey men who hurry home,
We spent our lives only too hastily.

Farewell
You should know that
My professor,
during the last class he would ever teach;
Asked whether we should sacrifice
The lives of the elderly, people like him,
So that we can survive.
“Yes, I think you should.” Was his answer
And after we said thank you
And clapped,
And left the meeting one by one,
Tears swelled up his eyes;
Pixels that froze on my screen,
For half a second
And dissolved into digital spaces.

Freedom
You should know that
We are the descendants of people
Who escaped from Plato’s Cave.
Like our ancestors, we also like to talk about
the pursuit of freedom;
But when rays of freedom finally dawned us
We felt nothing but naked;
the sense of insecurity and discomfort
That bite through our skin.
So we anxiously put new shackles on ourselves
Like putting on clothes to cover our bodies,
To make us feel less shameful.
We learn the lesson, that freedom exist in the familiar, sweet feeling of security and its slavery

Twilight
My dreams always end in twilight
The hour when my eyesight weakens
Yet hindsight becomes so acute
That the past and the present can be intertwined
Into a rope drenched
in the light mist of a Summer evening after the rain.
I love to sit in silence
In this rose-gold hour
And watch moments of human history
Grow into one another like a film loop.
Words start to change their meanings,
Because all present strangeness will become future allegories.

[submitted on 5/9/2020]