The Distance of My Home

By Enkehada
Translated By Wang Ping

Translated  from the Chinese 

At dawn, my dreams are torn
Looking through the cracks
I see a painting
Of a camel as big as an elephant
In her eyes
I see my home

At noon I come home from work
The winter sky is broken into pieces
The sunlight flows in from holes
I gaze at the painting on the wall
The camel is in heat, in its eyes
I smell green grass

I look around, footprints everywhere ...
The snow-white prints belong to the baby 
Camels coming home
The prints hotter than the earth belong 
To Buddha roaming around the world
The cold prints like ice belong 
To the broken painting 
The prints darker than my eyes belong 
To those who have left home

In the dark, night is approaching 
I have a dream in the light of poetry
My dream floats in space—
The horse saddle is still wet
My cold fingers
Stroke the painting on the wall—
The desert in the shape of sand dunes
Is the size of my home
The distance of chipping and breaking
Is the distance between countryside and city
The time to heal
Is beyond the dream

Notes:

This poem is part of the portfolio “Wind Crossing Grasses: Poems from Poems from China’s Dragon Rivers.” The folio is an excerpt from the forthcoming anthology of the same name, translated and edited by Wang Ping, with a co-introduction from Gary Snyder (Kinship Poetry Press, 2026). You can read the rest of the folio in the July/August 2025 issue. 

Source: Poetry (July/August 2025)