Chen Kun-lun / 陳坤崙

Chen Kun-lun（b. 1952）was an editor of Great Stage Bookstore Publishing Co. and now is Chairman of Chuen-hwui Publishing Co. and Chuen-hwui Printing House, as well as co-founder and president of Literary Taiwan Magazine.  He was awarded with Excellent Youth Poet Prize in 1975. His published poems include Speechless Little Grass（1974）and Human Firehouse（1980）.

E-mail：literarytaiwan@seed.net.tw

        Speechless Little Grass / 無言的小草

So long as you can’t understand

You take a hoe to shovel me away

As if convicted of a big crime and burned me to ashes

So long as you get tired

You lie on me

To let me taste alone the feeling of being insulted

So long as you are idle

You weed out my tender stalk and root

Tear up easily like a sheet of paper

And end my life

No matter how you treat me

I can’t but endure

Because I am only a little grass

I’ve been waiting

Until one day I’ll eat your fat

And then cover you

         Thrush Birds / 畫眉鳥

Thrush birds like to be jailed

In a cage covered with a black cloth

Thrush birds

Would rather live in a dark world

Than see the lively, intelligent humans

As soon as they see people with blinking eyes

They will die of fear at once

Within one hour

How fearful humans are

Maybe only thrush birds know

        The Sea as a Man / 大海這個人  

All sizes of rivers in the word

Besiege and assault me from all directions.

The filthy and stinking river water,

Together with oil dregs, garbage , and decomposed dead animals,

All besiege and assault me.

Thereupon, to preserve my purity , I create waves from my heart ,

Rolling and surging,

To push the filths they have manufactured

Back to the seashores of the word.

Day after day without stop

I prove to the people in the word in a rage

That I am still immaculate.

        A Soil Thief / 偷土記

In a soilless city

I have to become a soil thief

In order to cultivate flowers

When there’s nobody watching

I , with a plastic bag and a knife in hand

Nervously begin my stealthy act

With the grass and trees all looking at me

I seem to hear

The indistinct laughter of the wind and trees

They must be laughing at me : the first soil

Thief in history

（Translated by William Marr ）