○ Ying Tong
[This is my first English poem. Published in Pembroke Academic Journal. 2023
Many thanks to my close friends and my editor, Michelle.]
On Matriculation Day, I blundered into the ranks of freshers
in white shirts, with two black ribbons floating behind sub fuscs
Marching, they belonged to an alliance of innocence,
signalling tiredness of various levels while exuberant inside
I fell behind along Queen’s Lane, where curly tan walls
guided them ahead, yet ran into them again under the Bridge of Sighs,
where I took a detour. I lost my ceremony stolen by the virus,
thus, belonging to another coalition of nothingness, or imagination
Dual sentiments arose to define the position of my eyes:
from an elder, a slight paternalism but also, a virtue
not to spoil any conundrums of their adolescence. Or perhaps
from a superfluous contemporary who had been locked in to see
the hazard and scarcity of time, but with less melancholy,
for the vaccine had induced a novel pain and calmness
A distinctive combination, simulating the practice of such clichés:
bitterness and wisdom, loss and gain, vibrance and demise
A cliché of ethical dichotomy, an acceptance of compromise
Those who were excellent in this practice are becoming immune to
the first coming. “I am old”, said someone, a girl who clipped a cigarette
between two fingers, standing at the gate of her college, my college
Without any warning, she had run into this round of Matriculation
by accident, as an alumnus, once a fresher. Still young, she shouted
aloud to her friends, “I’m getting old!” A discovery of new loneliness
mixed with panic, and the outrage of being carried away from her
prime, a stage she was not yet able to flexibly define. Drunken enough,
her voice sparked, heading towards a monolith of reality,
covered by the smoke against the dark sky. Calmly, I walked past those
empty bottles left at midnight, and listened to repeated complaints
vented by a gardener for freshers’ vomitus. At the end of the day,
I gave applause to my students, the stars, and measured indignation
then continued to put pins in a pile of memoirs from wartime soldiers
Indeed, it took long to admit my role as a passer-by, from kindergarten,
Young Pioneer, to a doctoral candidate, to a Buddhist understanding
of vanishing. Who has been forced to embrace the monolith
with nihilism and a pretext of benevolence? Perhaps, this is a subject
as old as the Trojan, as new as a red poppy worn in the modern age,
east and west. Isn’t it? If identified, emerging parallels are silks of cocoons
binding our feet from moving on. Should they be forgotten, they fade
into a sophisticated face, hanging in the backdrop of every Matriculation,
sometimes as the blurry face of the Sphinx, or an angel with the trumpet
2022.11-12
2023.1