The esteemed Chinese poet and scholar Yongbo Ma translated my poem “Love Blitz” into Chinese and emailed me a video of the recitation of the poem. The English version follows the Chinese translation. I hope you can access the video. It has adorable visuals. My poem and Yongbo’s bio follow, but I don’t have any information about the woman who recited the poem. Perhaps she also produced the video.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tP8hM9DFEWPG3AF6ajtlfkymvM3wKBSA/view?usp=drivesdk
Love Blitz
I love you as the thumbprint on your coffee mug
or a strand of hair in your birthday cake
or the peach fuzz on your chin
or the fallen leaves you scoop up every year.
My love for you is a long road trip to the arctic
in a car with no heater.
The salted roads corrode our chassis
I sing our love like a crow
tattling on a wandering dove
or a squirrel barking for sunflower seeds
or a river flooding the wetlands
and carrying off debris from our last storm.
My heart is a cup holding your hot cocoa.
I sip you till you’re gone.
First published by Prolific Pulse Press on Medium and then Wildfire Magazine
About the Translator
Ma Yongbo 马永波 (b1964), https://mayongbopoetry.wordpress.com/ has 7 published poetry collections. Ma Yongbo 马永波 is listed among the 100 famous contemporary Chinese poets since the 1920s. He is the main poet-translator of Western postmodern poetry on the mainland, including Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens, Pound, Williams and Ashbery. His translation of Moby Dick, has sold over half a million copies. He teaches at Nanjing University of Science and Technology. Collected Poems of Ma Yongbo (four volumes, Eastern Publishing Centre, 2024) comprising 1600 poems, celebrate 40 years of writing poetry.
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