Walked my dog in the evening and ran into a gaggle of policemen downstairs handling a domestic dispute. Headed home and read some poems to avoid scanning the news lest I see familiar faces being cuffed. This is just another day. Translated an excerpt of the poem <模糊記述，六四三十> by Wong Bik-wan as my dog slept soundly.
A Blurred Remembrance, 6430
Please, don’t walk with your head down.
Please, don’t board the train.
Please, don’t traipse across the fields—they perished yesterday.
Gaze out the window, shut your eyes.
You will never see the birch wilting in desolation again.
And the skeletal remains of a whole cow,
Why does it maintain the same demeanour?
If it can no longer move forward.
Why is its mouth ajar, pointing skyward?
The sun is shining, someone is walking by.
You will greet a person standing next to the railway.
You, unseen, will fold down a seat, facing the train aisle.
The morose green train chugs along, 36 hours, northbound,
On a grey and gloomy iron bridge in the grey rain along the Yangtze,
A moment of suspension, then, an explosion.
“Where am I now?” “Must be a day that I wake up bright, in the morning light.”
At this instant, you remember this man dressed in an antsy hue of blue.
You know what
Lifts his bronzed, dusty yellow arms.
He has known—cigarette between his fingers—for thirty years,
Or even longer, how the winds were falling,
How the rains were howling into the Square.
And more oftentimes, the accidental and blurred remembrances of,
The eventuality of earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
How to cite: Tse, KW. “Just Another Day: KW Tse.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 4 Jun. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/06/04/kw-tse.
KW Tse is a Hongkonger, slow reader, still in Hong Kong. Prefers to fly under the radar.
Cha 