Lee Tzu Pheng (b. 1946)
SELECTED POEMS
Cardboard
She has made her pile,
in a manner of speaking:
this is her haul, so much
it towers over her –
but the hoard is mostly
cardboard.Boxes of nothing
collected day after day
after day, and at night
she measures and builds
her worth in grams of hope,
but it's the same story:
dreams imploding in the scales' decline towards
age and loss, herself
buried at ground zero
under the mountain of
emptiness and worry.
by Lee Tzu Pheng
from Common Life (2018)
