for kim woods

Three Poems Nokan Walis, John Balcom

Duckweed

"More and more like the floating duckweed..."

Someone returned to the tribe this evening

Amid bamboo fences scattered over the mountain

Pondering the pains and regrets of history

Too much rice wine to drink

Makes for incoherent babbling

Mizunuo, you've lived a pretty good life

What makes you suffer so?

Your hut was completed before winter

The peach trees blossomed in the saddle of the mountain

In the second month

Someone married a girl from a different village

Everyone is overjoyed

So what is it that worries you so?

"Three hundred years ago our ancestors

wove fishnets and caught fish

Large sailing ships from the West appeared

blocking out the sun

Fifty years later they shunned the farmed plains

Returning to the forests to hunt

Aside from fighting over the land

We lived in peace with each other

When the Japanese came, what was termed 'civilizing the savages'

Was in fact flogging, from the coast to the mountains

We've been like duckweed the last century..."

Someone returned to the tribe this evening

Rubbing the wound of history getting drunk

No one doubted his suffering

Perhaps he was mourning for his far-flung relatives

Perhaps he was angry at the destitution of the tribe

But not questioning justice and love

Though quietly drinking and talking

Though someone keeps leaving for distant places

Like a ripe fruit falling from the tree

Youth of Wushe

I don't recognize Tasiqisi's face

The 1920s are too remote from today

Grandma says the pink cherry blossoms flower for him

That day he abandoned his books and returned to his tribe

Led the Atayal people against the canons

They all died in battle, Grandma told me to look at

The monument at the head of the road

The monument is mottled

Covered with lichen

But it's still difficult to cover Tasiqisi's hard work

At the end of the 1970s I graduated from the teacher's college

And was stationed at the front lines, two years later

I took up chalk and taught in a school far from home

Constantly I complained about the wastewater and air pollution

And the problems with public transportation

I'm certain that if you came to the city

You'd be bad tempered too

The cherry blossoms still shimmer in winter

Tasiqisi gradually grows vague

The monument is still covered in lichen

The city performs and plunders

I still have to make a living

In the 1990s I'm still hoping to meet a nice girl and get married

Having a son would be nice

(The world's population is exploding)

Peaceful into old age, if you were I

I think you'd want the same

Down the Mountain

At the station on the way to Baling Mountain

A woman squats quietly and humbly

While her children run around without worries

They all look very happy.

They are going down the mountain to shop

Using their harsh Mandarin and perhaps

Some gestures too.

It's the spring of 1985,I'm at the station

I saw farmers from the plains in the 1960s

Going to the city, often quiet and ill at ease

In the city, I never speak Atayal

I do my utmost to scrub my dark skin

I do my utmost to suppress my savage blood

And even suppress my childhood memories

I've learned to chat happily with others

Tie a bow tie and drink coffee

They softly pat my shoulders praising me

I suddenly felt weighed down

Today, many years later

At the station on Baling Mountain

Familiar as before, the sound of a woman

Her sadness, and the innocence of the children

Walis Nokan is a member of the Pai-Peinox group of the aboriginal Atayal tribe in Taiwan. He graduated from Taizhong Teachers College and teaches at Freedom Elementary School in his hometown, Heping Village, in central Taizhong County. Born in 1961, he started writing poetry at the age of sixteen and has been the editor of Hunter Culture, a journal dedicated to Taiwanese aboriginal culture.