Poems by Joyce Ritchie

Springtime in Fengdu

by Joyce Ritchie

From Canary Spring 2019

A Midwest transplant to the coastal Mid-Atlantic Chesapeake Bay watershed, Joyce grew up in a small town carved out by the confluence of two rivers. This poem grew out of a boat trip down a river half a world away.

I Passing Down

In Fengdu the mothers and fathers tell
stories to their children over dinner,
rice, sweet potatoes roasting on the
cooking fire fill the hut with smokey warmth.
In their children’s eyes they see generations,
the deep pool of wuji, infinite nothingness
from which grew yin and yang, unity of
existence, eternal interacting
               female/male
               moon/sun
               dead/alive
               grave/house
How to tell the children that tomorrow
for the last time they will sweep ancestral
graves soon to be lost, like this house, to the
river’s rising? How to tell the children
every day now is a story to hold
in bone and heart against the rising river?

II Veneration/Supplication

Remember this, children, in bone and heart,
how today we swept the ancestor’s graves
of the detritus of the year, how we left
small offerings for the favorable emerging
from dark yin winter to spring’s yang light.
Remember how you gathered bouquets of
gold mother chrysanthemum, blossoms
from the White Dove tree. Remember
our words to the dead: Thank you for your
sacrifices which give us such bounty,
health, long life. Forgive us this sacrifice
of the chi harmony wind water feng shui
that we planned with care for you. May you rest
gently cradled by ancient Mother River.

III A Father’s Lament

Each day he watches Mother River rising,
lapping at the fields and the little hut.
Each day the river gorge reverberates with
the ring of metal on metal, a new road
being carved from sheer granite, rhythmic
marking of the river’s inexorable rise.
Each day he carries a piece of their life
on his back up a switch-back path to high ground.
He doesn’t know to call it what it is.
What he knows is the feeling of dry dirt
crumbling between his fingers, scattering
down the mountain baked dry by beating sun,
his hand bereft of the heft and promise of
moist earth made fertile by ancient river silt.

IV Boatman’s Song

Each day the river rises faster,
past the 25 meter marker, the 75,
soon the 150. White Crane Mountain
no longer soars so high over his little boat
floating slowly now on sluggish currents,
nets dragging empty. In the thirst of noonday
sun, he cups hand-to-mouth, bitter salt stings
his tongue. Ancient Mother River could not know
she would be dammed, nor the insects whose
wet wings betray them, nor the fish circling
windows and walls of submerged cities, searching
for familiar tributaries lost to the depths,
nor the Siberian Crane seeking shallows
succumbed to the rising river. In the distance,
the Golden Swallow sings its unanswered song
from higher and higher branches.