Esther Vincent Xueming (b. 1987)

SELECTED POEMS

State Land

1

The field is claimed by the sign staked
into the ground: state land.

Blue nets line the edge, turning
communal space into exile.

Will the egrets return?
Will the land forgive?

2

I remember migrant workers playing cricket
on their day off.
They would lay out rope on the field

to mark off the boundary of their makeshift pitch,
then begin to play, each time
opening up the circle

to ease each newcomer into the game.
The kite flyers, mostly elderly men, found freedom
in the skies where their feet would never tread,

bodies forever anchored to earth.
How they would captain their kites into unknown winds–
an orange stingray, a golden eagle, a red fox.

Then, there were the Frisbee players, young,
sun-kissed fools running after spinning plastic,
playing through sun or rain.

*

Now there stand, two yellow,
silent cranes, waiting.

First, they took down the rude wooden fences
one hot afternoon, erecting new posts

to partition the field
into nameless plots with blue

ghost nets.
Nets that lure and lie, that enslave

an enamoured butterfly
who thought she could reach the sky

beyond the mesh of blue.
Next came the excavator

dredging up the belly of the earth.
I recall walking past fresh wet earth, thinking

so this is what sorrow smells like,
when a mother is forced to give.

We could learn from the mynahs,
who take from her only what they need,

or the egrets, who find temporary respite,
each migration uncovering new truths, of lost

places and changed faces, of strange ghost nets
that beach themselves on state land.

3

For days the silence
haunts me,
until one evening, after the rain,
it is broken by the beating of white wings

that arrive in the distance,
encircling the lonely field.

Walking out to meet them,
I find fourteen egrets still
in the moment of the hunt,
heads bowed,

treading softly as they dip
yellow beaks into the tall, wet grass,
unperturbed by onlookers,
they and I, separated

and bound
by a gossamer blue.

by Esther Vincent Xueming
from Red Earth (2021)

 

SELECTED POEMS: "Pilgrims" >