Yang Fong / 楊風

Yang Fong（b. 1943）, pen name of Yang Hui-nan, a retired professor of philosophy from National Taiwan University, member of Li Poetry Club, Association of Modern Poetry in Taiwan, and Taiwan PEN.  His publications include：

1. 1.      Collections of poems: “Under the White Cherry Tree”, “Boy from the Mountain”, “Meditations Concerning Flowers”, “Poetic Words, Buddha’s Heart” and “Portraits of Taiwanese Poets: Yang Fong’s Poems”；
2. 2.      Play: “Angels Spreading Flowers” ；
3. 3.      Gay stories: “That Autumn”, “A Fantastic Legend Concerning Deep Ecology” and “The Fallen Love” ；and
4. 4.      Others: “Zen Songs in Rainy Nights: Reading the Platform Sutras”, “Letters from the Moon in the Water”, “Zen Thoughts and Zen Poems: Singing Songs in the Dense Woods of Zen Poetry” and “Our Land, Our Songs: Profound Calls of Deep Ecology”.

e-mail：hnyang@ntu.edu.tw

        March / 三月

I heard that the wind has aged.

Love has gone over the hill,

Snow is falling,

A hump of withered leaves indicates that

The solitude of mountains is

Just like yours.

Walking through precarious banks and arduous arduous cliffs,

Walking through a thousand miles of steppes.

Looking at the trees, the flowers and the clouds in the sky,

March was once a month of gaiety and joy.

But now the sprouts of spring cannot be seen.

The dream bell in front of the temple tens of thousands of miles away,

Has it tolled yet?

        Taipei 101 / 台北101

Copying the Twin Towers,

In the zerox machine,

Another kind of capitalism is reproduced.

Made of fermented testosterone,

The scene of the city has devoured the blue sky.

Occupying the whole vista,

Demons hugging and kissing monsters.

From now on, the nightmare stays, never to leave.

Once the austere modernist structure is erected,

The others are forever excluded.

Dichotomic mode of thinking rips open world peace.

As to environmental ethics, that is but

A shadow trampled under its feet.

Thus, Afghanistan is conquered, Iraq crushed.

And rainforests disappearing,

From South America and South Asia.

In the remote Arctic and Antarctic, we see

A mosaic canopy of the broken ozone layer.

Come to think of it,

The post-modern deconstruction──

The view that we are all of one body,

And everything is a part of one’s own self,

Is only a philosophical idea on paper.