Hong Kong Young Writers Anthologies Poetry 2017 | Page 184

The Girl Hu Could Not Forget
St Paul's Co-educational College, Suen, Wing Man Evianne – 18
Lady Godiva would be proud;
I turn heads with naked sobriety
like a woman who cannot forget.
Strangers, in clothes unfitting,
waltz across the Bund
for a backdrop common
in their own homes—
it is a shrine
branded clear, a scar
on the otherwise perfect cheek—
with smiles etched into
faceless masks masking
a darkness which
oozes from slits for the eyes
to embrace the floors, their homes,
of a city of sin by day.
The plaza is a bloody carpet
for clean men pouring from
antique buildings
with the looks of a church.
I orient the Orient disguised as
a history, unfurled;
between oriental and orientalist
is a balance beam I trample
gracefully with ease.
Bound would I have been
had I a witch’s eyes,
nose of a cauldron’s steward,
dial back seventy-
seven years ago, unless
I refuged like a Russian
under the floorboards,
kiss the back of Plath’s hand;
her father wanted me dead,
until the river turned redder
than the soup I housed
in my veins.
Refreshed with Western
rage—the kind which tapers
off into laze,
by gifting your troubled mind