Featured Poet - Maria Xu
TO MOVE FORWARD
Nightfall
When the rolling waves do come in
So do my steps fall back into infinity
This moonless night befalls me
The only light—the glimmer of my tired eyes
The ribbons have frayed
The papers burned away
The fragments pierced together
Crystals—
Time has pressured them as they lay
So I thought that can only be the way
But alas
This last puzzle?
A meaning trapped in paradox
~
Midnight
No questions nor answers tell
The moment of its trigger relinquish
No tears nor silent scream
Register when the bell tolls
Of gears and cogs
This heart of issue
Rolling around
Can emotion ever be divined?
Toy nor prison
This last maze of mind
Attempt is failure
But failure never tried
No entrance nor exit
But victims all the same
What shall I make of this
Am I even sane?
Do the threads of my tapestry
Begin or ever end?
Do the patterns of this flat painting
Ever storybook the frame?
~
Late
Each rounded layer cracking
In the edges of this black stone
Do the waters cry through
Summons of the past fading away
All blank canvases now
To tell no more of you
No traveler will find me
No weary hero will see me
No specter of the future
Shall haunt me
It’s just me now
No stars to guide
The whispers of the gardens
No longer sound as sweet
The monsters of my childhood
No more than anger seethe
What trails that I walk
Now have me as lead
Lonely frontiers
I understand you now
So too does the silence speak to me
~
Asleep
These last years shift the seconds of dreams
No edge nor boundary
The brushstrokes blend
These bitter hues
Turning back time
To where I began
Meant running toward
Frail eternity’s land
Struck—
The hymn codas once again
But the notes carry no heavenly repose
My own voice carries the lows
The lonely and final repeat
Weaving these impossible measures
For some grander symphony I will never know
Stepping in time to this mad waltz
I thought I was doomed
To this
To me
Suffering fate’s loom
~
Dawn break
But fate and faith are a duo
Light and life within
Darkness divided
The rays come true and through
It’s just me now
No stars to guide
It’s just me now
The dawn burning eye
Never will I know the truth of this
Even as the puzzle falls apart
Beneath it lies another mystery
Layers of perpetuity
But as I sing the memories of the past
The future so faithfully comes forth
The Harmony of the End?
No—
Of Tomorrow
Not for me nor for you
Of the days of all of us
~
Mourning
Acceptance of the laughing tragedy
Are smiles so bitter
Sweetness in lieu
But once began
Even with no end
Do the kinder words
Come falling through
Paradox me this
In the deeper waters
An answer in riddle
So shallow but so simple
But all the more true
Even as the silt did rise
The waters never did forget
Of the darkened stone
Do fall apart and drag away
Did the clearer rivers flow
For another today
A bygone conclusion
A solution so absurdly obvious
For happiness, for peace, for serenity
For me and for you
All of us
Humming within
~
Zenith
The story shifted
The narratives transforming
The past ever so gentle
The present writing
The futures of blue
Where the sun shines
My brighter eyes
Goodbye nevermore
As the stone rolls away the waves
I do say
Hello to another form of you
Even when all is lost
We never do lose
The permanent junctions of
Crossroads formed
Where others came to you
And you to them
Where the path taken
Is a thread woven
Perhaps gold and green tomorrow
But never without its true hue
Our histories speak
Of the words of the present
Showers of wisdom
Brought colors of yore
For Hope
Of wings and feathers
Aeternus Deus
From me
From all of us
I’ll never forget
My promise to you.
ABOUT THE POEM:
"To Move Forward" is the longest poem I have ever written and is about the emotional and cognitive confusion I faced while trying to reconcile a traumatic event that happened to me. To this day, there is no clear answer to be found about what happened specifically, but this was my first poem to express an understanding that even without clarity, making meaning out of the fragments of the past is possible.
KINTSUGI
Time and time again
The vessel that holds our lives
Falls apart
In surveying the damage
You see the center crack that runs
Far right and then
Jeers to the left
You see the broken ridges of
People lost and gone
How the slices of memories
Damage your heart
What is left behind
Is where life spills out in grief
Still
Tenderly, as you would
You pick up and mend
Even as life runs away from you
Even as the shards hurt
Even as the past bleeds out
What is left is never the same again
Tending to the wounds is honoring
The past that never was
As the gold shines through the brokenness
Bittersweetness—life is held
Where everything fell apart
The center holds
Just one more time…
ABOUT THE POEM: "Kintsugi" was written in the throes of grief. It embodies the art of Kintsugi, a Japanese art form of mending broken objects with golden lacquer that resonates strongly with many people who have felt broken.
TO BE SEEN
When you first fall into
The chasm of darkness
From the heavenly light above
You are blinded until found
The feeling of loss
And the fear of death
Hang from the stalactites
Uncovered by the dwellers of the deep
You are pulled into their huddles
And initiated into this dark world
Your shivering shoulders are blanketed
By the sudden awareness
That this was reality now
There are no stars or moon here
And people slave away
In the mines
They unearth
What precious light they can find
Most end up walking into the Forbidden
Where the light ceases
Completely
The few left keep the camps going
So the cycle may begin again
But, a few end up finding enough gems
To walk around in clarity
Unmasking the truth:
What we call darkness is only
What we haven’t met before
ABOUT THE POEM: "To be seen" was written to describe how I've come to see my role as a peer support listener. Many people end up in darkness through crisis and struggle to find light. However, in the darkness there is still hope. When you become familiar with darkness and shine a light on it, it eventually ends up being something normal and understood, just as listening to others' suffering becomes more natural the more you heal and understand yourself.
TO DUST
To be broken in all the ways
Good or bad
Is to become one
With the sands of life
That bend with the wind
And move silently
Through the night
ABOUT THE POEM: "To dust" is a simple poem meant to be an alternative perspective on brokenness. Instead of mending the object, the object turns to dust, but in doing so, it becomes flexible and free flowing as sand. That freedom is non-attachment.
TO DISTILL WATER
They say to distill water
It takes a thousand years of effortlessness
As water travels through
Each teardrop contains within
The impurities of the heart
The distiller,
As patient as time’s shade
Turns the world upside down
Until the water flows again
Until the impurities slowly fall away
One cannot hold tightly to the outcome
Because it is a futility
One must flow gently through the cracks
As nature intends
As to hold onto the clouds that pass through
With mortal hands clasping
Is doubtlessly another way to
Cling to nothingness,
Attachment
ABOUT THE POEM: "To distill water" represents my perspective on suffering through an Eastern lens. I've faced many challenges in my mental health journey, including symptoms that have no easy answer and have plagued me for a while. Learning to sit with deep suffering and have patience has not been easy, but this is my poem on how to let go of suffering and to heal slowly through each turn of distillation.
ABOUT MARIA
Maria is a writer located in New Jersey, USA, whose work integrates Western psychology with Eastern philosophies. She approaches poetry as both an intellectual inquiry and a path toward healing. Her poem "To distill water" won publication in NAMI NJ's annual poetry contest, and her work has appeared on theprose.com. She is currently interested in becoming a therapist.
Contact:
Blog: https://mariaxu36.wixsite.com/maria-xu/blog
Bluesky: @maria.xu.bsky.social
