A Poem for My Chinese Friends (写诗给我的中国朋友)

Happy Spring Festival

In the Year of the Rat

Which some consider

A sign of the plague

It's time to be

Nimble and swift

As we leap from 

Ship to ship

We may yet find

A route back home

After living in the Diaspora

For far too long

Photo by Christy Rupp

春节快乐

是老鼠年

有人认为

瘟疫征兆

但实际上
灵活性是

我们最要

记住的事

老鼠法是

从船到船

快速跳跃

 如果沿着

这条路走

提高运气

引导回家

这么长时

是散居者

Ode for the Deep Sea Turtle

Of the deep sea turtle

As with you and me

It's equally true

That we feel safer
When hidden in 

Whatever it was
 We once were

This is a secret
To our survival

That the past is

Valuable enough

To carry around with us as
A permanent attachment

And whether deep
In metaphor or flesh
The messages encoded
On our backs may indeed
Be difficult for us to see
Let alone understand
Such is the opacity
Of our dreams
Which nonetheless eventually
Come to encase us just as
A shell does the Leatherback

In the end
We're most alive

In our extremities

Yet always at the ready

To draw inward
If and when we feel
Unduly threatened
Or attacked

 Deep Sea Turtle by M. Bridge

Poem for Beginner's Mind (初心)

You can fill the page

With your personal slang

And silly rhymes

And still not advance

Beyond the starting line

Because the empty page

Is the surest sign of

Beginner’s mind

When mind itself

Falls under erasure

Only then does duality

Begin to subside like

The shadowless tree

Under a cloudless sky

In such silence where 
Poems from the first abide