3 May 2016 sye   » (Journeyer)

1st final Draft
This poem is dedicated to Hopewell Sports and Family Medicine Dr. James Vandenburg, Kenneth Daniels, O.D and Dr. Darma Ie with Delaware Valley Retina Associates. I am forever grateful for their prognosis and subsequent surgical and other continued professional care to restore vision loss due to Macula Off Retinal Detachment in mad march of 2016. I am also encouraged by the liking of it from a good friend of mine, Prof. Mark Burgess from Oslo, himself a great scientific writer and practitioner of his unique 'promise' theory. For all the promise-enabling of neuro-scientific discovery, I can't shake off this view of despair at my own loss of vision, mostly on political front, in place of theological one.

I am a long time resident in West Trenton, New Jersey, with my husband Eric and our two sons. We attend St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Yardley, Pennsylvania.

Eye Witness

Fortnights ago, my right eye turned evil.
It splits the world in half:
one side clear, the other misguided.

Naturally, i was puzzled but went on, as if
my world is unchanged.
Then my educated mind caught up,
'one must check with professionals, for
such radical change on point of view'

It was exactly 7 days
before Good Friday,
my right eye was put on trial.

Three doctors examined it
with great interests and gladness.
Each one alerted the next
to engage in its urgent care.

Monday came and the vitrectomy was delivered
to posterio chamber where macular must suffer
a total change of its atomsphere

So that the heart of matter
shall remain rightfully restored
and reflected in my due time.

After the execution with laser sharpness,
three nights and three days,
my head is ordered to be
in a certain spot for the promise
of good vision to return to me.

On the Good Friday, as if
unplanned and perchance,
I stumbled on some words divine
by a newly acquintainted poet
Theodore Roethke to my trouble at hand.

'Night Crow'
When I saw that clumsy crow
flap from a wasted tree,
a shape in the mind rose up:
over gulfs of dream
flew a tremendous bird
Further and further away
Into a moonless black
deep in the brain, far back.

Back to my troubled common sense
Watch out people, I've got an evil eye now
for better or for worse

Of future tense in all words, still
alive in the blind spot of eye witness
from another time or another place.

At wit's end, a world of blind faces
staring into bone cold abyss
as legend has it.

That beside the envy of night crow
a song bird rises, out of white ashes
Fear not, the end of all creations.




Tension in contextualized translation...from English to Chinese, wor(l)ds apart... ? - ResearchGate. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/post/Tension_in_contextualized_translationfrom_English_to_Chinese_worlds_apart [accessed May 3, 2016].

Latest blog entries     Older blog entries

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!