The Five O’Clock Graveyard

If we sit side by side now,
and say nothing for a whole half hour,
and you say only that we get on fine without words,
and you move away a little, for a good look at the grave almost opposite us,
and you roll your eyes at me, because the dead are not to be laughed at,
and you'll sit alone on the bench I'm sitting on,
I'll be opposite you, opposite you, lying prone.


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Poetry From the February 2009 issue: The Graphic World, Part III: (Worth) Ten Thousand Words

Xiao KaiyuXiao Kaiyu

Xiao Kaiyu was born in 1960 in Sichuan province, and trained and worked as a doctor of Chinese medicine. He is the author of several volumes of poetry and has published poems and essays in various official and unofficial journals in China, and founded three underground poetry magazines. He spent a number of years in Germany. In recent years he has taught Chinese literature at universities in Shanghai and the central Chinese city of Kaifeng. His poems have been translated into German, English, Italian, French, Japanese, and Serbian.

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Translated from ChineseChinese by Alistair NoonAlistair Noon

Alistair Noon is poetry editor of Bordercrossing Berlin, a magazine concentrating on Anglophone writing from outside English-speaking countries, and no man's land, publishing German writing in English translation. He coordinates the annual Poetry Hearings festival in Berlin, and translates from German, Russian, and Chinese. His chapbook At the Emptying of Dustbins was published by Oystercatcher Press in 2009.

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