Two Poems

Autumn Twilight

              All the flaring of the day
Dissipates, leaving cracks
For waves of winds
    To sweep in a clear-cut night

Four Frogs

For the past half century, I have never seen
A single frog in this city, not even in the whole country
But there are four big-mouthed frogs leaping around
Afar in a ricefield of my native village, four frogs
Squatting under the rotten bridge on the way leading
To an unknown town, four frogs playing on a big
Lotus leaf in my heart, four frogs calling constantly
From the dark pages of history invisible at midnight
Four frogs meditating under a puti tree transplanted
In a nature park, four frogs swimming into a fish net
Like bloated tadpoles, the same four frogs whose
Monotoned songs resonate aloud in different tongues
With different pitches, yes, the four frogs still there

Yuan Changming co-edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan. Writing credits include 12 Pushcart nominations for poetry and 3 for fiction besides appearances in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17) and 2159 other publications worldwide. A poetry judge for Canada’s 44th National Magazine Awards, Yuan began to write prose in 2022, his hybrid novel DETACHING, ‘silver romance’ THE TUNER and short story collection FLASHBACKS available at Amazon.