Aiden Heung
This Very Moment
The destruction
of this house is vivid through
cracks that the exuberance
of weeds keeps
amplifying; you’d think green
could be more modest upon
slaking wet bricks
above
stacks of bamboo sticks.
The classical mistake
that it will come too suddenly,
the grand end, the collapse
of atoms
at a snap of the fingers
but here
in the gradual decay,
Every yesterday looks like a now
or a tomorrow
until—
Slowly,
we learn
to appreciate every moment
not as a blink of eyes,
but a path, like how
roots of green weeds
on the grey wall
trail in time.
About the writer:
Aiden Heung is a Chinese poet born and raised on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau. He writes about his personal past in a Tibetan Autonomous Town and the city of Shanghai where he currently lives. Other themes include ancestry, nature-human relations, queer culture, the dehumanizing force of the city, politics, and his imaginary wonderland. His words have appeared or are forthcoming in Australian Poetry Journal, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Poet Lore, Hobart, Parentheses, Barren Magazine, Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, Potomac Review, among other places. Heung is a reader of world literature.
Image: Twilight by Bruno Kurz (1957-). No medium specified. No size specified. 2016. By free license.
