Police Car, Poet, Snow
Yi Sha
Yi Sha
one wintry day
in a swirl of mud and snow
a police car came screaming
down the street
insufferably arrogant
as usual
shoving and pushing
its way through traffic
the funny thing was that
no matter how smug it acted
it could not shake off
the coat of snow that covered it
and made it look identical
to every other car
all crawling like hearses
and that’s why it was upset
as it passed
a poet who was crossing the road
got splattered from head to toe
with mud thrown by its filthy wheels
what he saw
made him suddenly feel like crying
associating what he’d just seen
with the ambiguous link
between this police car
of the state
and the idea that
poetry is like snow
There are no hints in Yi Sha’s poetry, no over-reliance on the imagination of his readers to make something out of next to nothing. He writes what he has to say with minimal linguistic fuss, with economy. “My language is naked”, he claims, and perhaps it is—if we take “dressing” to mean a form of artificial ornamentation. –Poetry International Web
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