English Original
I fell in love
with your long slender fingers
holding a book of poems
and later as they explored
the braille of my body
holding a book of poems
and later as they explored
the braille of my body
Always Filling Always Full, 2001
Margaret Chula
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
我愛上了
你修長的手指
拿著一本詩集
之後它們探索我身體
彷彿細讀一本點字書
我爱上了
你修长的手指
拿着一本诗集
之后它们探索我身体
仿佛细读一本点字书
Bio Sketch
Margaret Chula has published two collections of tanka: Always Filling, Always Full and Just This. She has promoted tanka through her one-woman dramatization, “Three Women Who Loved Love”, which traveled to Krakow, New York, Boston, Portland, Ottawa, and Ogaki, Japan. Maggie currently serves as president of the Tanka Society of America.
Margaret's tanka builds, line by line, to an unexpected yet thematically significant and visually and emotionally powerful ending/simile (the braille of my body), exploring the relationship between "writing," "gender relations" and "sexuality," one of the thematic foci of Mrs. Dalloway by my favourite Modernist novelist, Virginia Woolf.
ReplyDeleteAnd it might be interesting/will make me :-) to read Margaret's thought-provoking and sensual tanka as a sequel to mine below:
walking home
from the last night shift ...
I hold a copy
of my first chapbook
like the harvest of sorrow
Atlas Poetica, 22, 2015