2018 Hawker Prize submission #1
As promised, here's one (out of the six) of our submissions to the 2018 Hawker Prize—poem "yuan liang 原谅" by Joshua Ip, published in Volume 5 Issue 2. Playing on the (mis)pronunciation of forgiveness/to forgive in Mandarin and the consequent struggle with what forgiveness means, Ip's poem ultimately ends with the "question[ing of] memory, and language itself, as a viable medium for meaning and ultimately for forgiveness" (Ip, 2018).
(Ip, Joshua. (2017). Exegesis. The Eloquent Orifice, 5(2), e17–20.)
yuan liang 原谅
forgiveness is a chinese
character i do not remember
how to write. you would imagine
it would be grounded on the
heart radical, somehow, or associatively
somewhere the glyph for water
in all their dot–dashy morse remorse.
i play ‘sounds-like’ in this charade
and the second character
reminds me of a different-toned shower,
though i am informed this term
only applies in southeast asia
where we shower too much anyhow.
it is the first word i struggle with
the most, whether the heart
belongs there or not. in my sloppy accent,
it echoes that most-abused
of chinese poetic tropes—the moon,
it invokes that hoary chestnut by faye wong
or was it teresa teng?
they tell me forgiveness
is written the same simplified
or traditional, but i do not
believe them. when i trace out
their template there appear to be
missing lines, as if a brush landscape
was replaced by a sound byte, it sounds
like round, bright, and why do I always return
to this gaping blank, the moon?
perhaps if the birth order of my two unequal
languages were swapped, i could substitute,
as if by accident, forgetfulness
for forgiveness instead.
