A Poem Written
On the Last Day
of August
Helen Huynh (2025)
Wang Jiaxin Translated by John Balcom
Dreadful August, “so many anniversaries,
So many dead…”*
The pendulum of time has swung us back to autumn;
As if following the downward fall of the thermometer,
We “landed” in Central Park.
Friends brought ice tea, lychees, Chinese snacks,
We discussed rent, a critically ill friend, and a failed exhibition,
As well as setting the time for our next gathering.
Still, we must be grateful for the survival of poetry and art.
Acorns will burst, autumn wind and rain will wash away
The bloodstains, ice and snow will bring warm forgetting;
The Chinese rose will wither, in this foreign land it
Will “live in its thorns.”
We say goodbye, but we don’t know
Where the pendulum of time will swing us,
We just say, See you, See you.
*See Akhmatova’s poem August, Translated by Judith Hemeschemeyer.
Wang Jiaxin is a Chinese poet, essayist, and translator and has published more than forty books. His collection of poems in English is Darkening Mirror (Tebot Bach, 2017), translated by Diana Shi and George O’Connell, with a foreword by former US Poet Laureate Robert Hass. His poems have been published in The American Poetry Review, American Poets, The Kenyon Review, Washington Square Review and The Hopkins Review. He has been a poet-in-residence at the Dutch Literary Foundation (Amsterdam, 2022) and at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa (2013).