The vacillations of the scholar Wu Mi (㕦宓) 1894-1978

At ten I knew myself blind. I looked through tiny windows and

my fortress memory began to covet ochre and septic yellow sands.

At twelve I ventured into the chamber and dreamt in scarlet.

I added a hundred hesitant vermillion birds to floating golden lotus feet,

gathered bushels of soot-drenched fabrics, paper, horse-hair brushes,

an ink block, clouds of noodles and grandma’s pickles in jars,

arranging them in baskets along the inside walls of my den.

At seventeen I cut my braid, dipped it into night and painted my new name:

Wu Mi, a feeble sole certainty from which all manner of doubts and vacillations

spread as cobwebs across the eaves of my stone-clad remembering.

Wrapped in mind for sixty years, always more intimate than naked,

I peered and peered over the wall at love, one hair dropped

with each dawn’s regret, loosed for everything they do not accuse me of.

Wu Mi, the lover who loved in hollows and hard-mud voids, treading

shallow grey thresholds of an eternal innocence called tomorrow.

In death it is not that I come to understand what my life has been

(I have carried the dark as a torch, a palpitating doubt, the inner check,

chiming morality is to hesitate): in death it is that I cease to understand life.

I find that, as my red-sore sure accusers scale the walls, I admire them.

At seventy-six my eyes are stones, but I see them come at me as the sun.

Wu Mi was a philosopher who worked on Doubt. He was a Chinese Kierkegaard in a way. He was struggled against and killed during the Cultural Revolution in China (1966-1976)

The vacillations of the scholar Wu Mi (㕦宓) 1894-1978 was long listed for the UK National Poetry Competition in 2017.