Chen-ou Liu's Translation Project: First English-Chinese Haiku and Tanka Blog

Showing posts with label sea. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sea. Show all posts

Saturday, October 25, 2025

Homeland Tanka

I murmur
the return to my homeland ...
two parts of me
stretch over a preposition
and a surging ocean

Friday, August 1, 2025

Exile Haiku

tenth year in exile ...
wave after wave rinsing
my shadow

Fourth Prize, New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition 2025

Comment by the Judge, Scott Mason: The persistent “otherness” commonly felt by an exile finds a poignant natural correlate in this poem. As the years come and go, the beach waves continually advance and recede; yet they can never wash away the protagonist’s physical shadow, nor the felt sense of a shadow existence when separated from one’s “true” home—perhaps a home located on the other side of the ocean from where he or she now stands. [I’m reminded here of Dante: “You shall find out how salt is the taste of another man’s bread” (Paradiso XVII)]

Wednesday, July 30, 2025

Beach Party and Booms Haiku

Against the Drowning Noise of Other Words, CCXI: "beach party and booms"
written in response to The New Yorker, July 28, 2025Israel’s Zones of Denial
Amid national euphoria over the bombing of Iran—and the largely ignored devastation in Gaza—a question lurks: What is the country becoming?

Tel Aviv's beach party
the faint boom, boom, boom
from Gaza



FYI: Tel Aviv ranks among world's top ten beach cities (and party cities)  in  new National Geographic poll

And here are relevant excerpts and remarks taken from  The New Yorker, July 28, 2025: "Israel’s Zones of Denial:"

When we go to the beach, you can hear the booms from Gaza. When you eat a lollipop or an ice cream, you hear things being blown up... Not only is reality horrible, you also don’t know what the real story is.

Etgar Keret, Israeli writer and Tel Aviv liberal

What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians.

-- Ehud Olmert, former Israeli Prime Minister.

... the war in Gaza has produced a people “who have lost everything and feel only humiliation and abandonment—and despise hypocritical Western moralism. This will feed future militants, and how they behave will be shaped by old grievances and new technologies—which Israel masters today, but they could master, too.” In the familiar pattern, today’s resolution is tomorrow’s tinderbox.

-- Malley Agha, who was once a peace negotiator for the Palestine Liberation Organization.


Haaretz, July 31: The Victim Identity Israel Built Over Generations Now Fuels Its Denial of Genocide in Gaza

Genocide does not require a single, explicit directive; rather, it's the result of a process in which rhetoric, policy, political discourse, collective dehumanization and repeated patterns of action converge into mass acts of destruction.

But the saddest chapter in Israel's increasing tendency to deny the genocide in Gaza is reserved for Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority. The historians who work there and devote days on end to investigating the events of the Holocaust are choosing to silence their mouths and pens when it comes to the horrors of Gaza. In light of the flood of statements at the beginning of the war by Israeli politicians calling for mass killings there, a group of local scholars turned to Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan and requested that the institution publish a public condemnation of the declarations, specifically those calling for genocide. But in January 2024 Dayan replied to Prof. Amos Goldberg, who initiated the move: "The six million Jews who were murdered in the Shoah are entitled to an institution that deals with them and with them alone. Therefore, Yad Vashem doesn't deal with genocide as such but only with its interface with the Shoah… Our area of activity is the Shoah, and only the Shoah."

The comments written by the Yad Vashem chairman are unsettling not only because of his silence, but also because his words are wrapped in a cloak of ostensible institutional integrity, while turning an arrogant back to the sense of historic responsibility that is supposed to inform the memorialization of the Holocaust. "Six million Jews are entitled to an institution that deals with them alone," writes Dayan – suggesting an exclusivity of the memory of murdered Jews as an excuse for hardheartedness, for closing one's eyes and maintaining silence in the face of ongoing war crimes and tens of thousands of slaughtered and starved people. All part of the terrible crime being perpetrated by the descendants of another genocide, the Shoah, among others.

Wasn't the murder of six million Jews also enabled due to many around the world washing away responsibility? Yad Vashem's entrenchment in the claim that their expertise are limited to the Holocaust is an act of moral bankruptcy, of disavowal of responsibility based on institutional convenience and the ideological adoption of a governmental policy responsible for horrific war crimes. It is a dire betrayal of the values of liberty, justice and the sanctity of human life, which the memory of the Holocaust is supposed to teach us.

For the past three generations Israel has been constructing an identity of victimhood, ranging from acts perpetrated during the Holocaust to those of Hamas on October 7. It denies its own crimes and is therefore living in a permanently distorted reality. Any attempt to speak about Israel's crimes against the Palestinians is seen as a threat not only to the image of the nation but to its very survival. The defensive narrative has become foundational to Israel's national identity, and any criticism of this narrative is met with the kind of institutional and public violence we are witnessing today

And Haaretz, July 31:  Americans Should Ask Not Only What War Has Done to Gaza, but Also What It's Done to Israel

Israeli TV debates have shown just how far the local media is willing to go to look away from Gaza. Since the war began, Israeli audiences have largely been shielded from the reality of Gaza's devastation. It's not just censorship – it's that most Israelis would rather not know. 

Saturday, April 5, 2025

Doll Drifting Haiku

moonlight
in wave after wave
a doll drifting

Frogpond, 48:1, Winter 2025

Sunday, February 23, 2025

Seashore Sunset Haiku

seashore sunset
rippling gold between me
and the world beyond

Japanese translation by Hidenori Hiruta

金色に海の夕日の波光る彼岸の空と私の間

Saturday, November 30, 2024

Monday, September 9, 2024

A Writer Blocked Inside

in a seaside cafe
alone, listening ...
summer night breeze

waiting for the Muse ...
the seaside cafe tables
fill and empty

from a sea of words
the Muse rises with breasts covered
awake ...not yet awake



AddedAgainst the Drowning Noise of Other Words, XCVI: "fireballs"

as if
there is no tomorrow ...
fireballs over Gaza


AddedAgainst the Drowning Noise of Other Words, XCVII: "evacuation"
after Jane Reichhold

Gaza evacuation
bombed-out ruins
                             after
                                     bombed-out ruins

FYI: The prefatory note refers to the following classical haiku:

coming home
flower
           by
               flower

San Francisco Haiku Anthology, 1992

In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, "poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty." 

-- Seamus Heaney, an Irish poet, playwright and translator who received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. 


Added:

an old woman
claps her raised hands
twice ...
where the Shinto shrine
once stood ten years ago


Added: Game Show, 2024, LXVI

Presidential "Debate" 
this deafening, deadly sound
of spit-drop silence


Added:

this unseasonal heat ...
two motorcycles race past me
and weave through
the rush-hour traffic, later
a third... a sixth one speeds by

Saturday, March 2, 2024

On Fire Tanka

this past summer
whatever wasn't on fire
was under water ...
I recall those days of kicking
at the patches of sea foam

Friday, December 1, 2023

Milky Way Haiku

the milky way 
between us
an ocean apart


German Translation by Chrysanthemum Editorial Team

die Milchstraße
zwischen uns
ein ganzer Ozean

Wednesday, March 22, 2023

Monday, December 19, 2022

More And More Talks

No More Fairy Tales, VII
written on the last day of COP15, 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity

as the night deepens 
my wife watches this climate news
with a frown ...
on the floor our son crawls
in circles, forward and backward

these blah-blah-blahs
about how much the world's oceans
will be protected ...
young reps walk out of the talk
in the rain mixed with snow


FYI: The Canadian Press, Dec. 14: "Issue of fairness:" Developing countries walk out of biodiversity talks over funding

Most of the world's biodiversity is located in the poorer countries of the global south. Most of the wealth — much of which was created at the expense of the world's biodiversity — exists in the north.

"It's everyone's problem, but we are not equally responsible for the drivers that have led to the destruction of biodiversity," said the delegate. "This is an issue of fairness."


And 

For far too long humanity has paved over, fragmented, over-extracted and destroyed the natural world on which we all depend... Now is our chance to shore up and strengthen the web of life, so it can carry the full weight of generations to come.

-- UN executive director, Inger Andersen


Added: written on the first day of Hanukkah

gathering dark
a 12-meter high menorah 
lit in Maidan Square

FYI: CBC News, Dec. 18: Ukraine's Jewish community is waging a "war between darkness and light" during Hanukkah, rabbi says


Added:

another wave
of widespread missile attacks ...
through the bunker's hole
she gazes at the giant menorah 
in Kyiv's Maidan Square