Mother
A pair of eyes in the sky tonight,
kind, unassuming, filled with melancholy.
Eyes that say to me tonight, ‘Cry,
child. Be strong enough to cry.’
I gaze for a long time into these eyes.
They are like the sky.
Not like dew, not like grapes –
no, they’re like the sky.
I glimmer with tears I can’t hold back.
The May night makes me glimmer.
Everything is so far away
but what’s faraway is what I can’t forget.
Wherever those eyes are, no matter where,
they’re like the sky. Because every day,
as long as I’m standing here under the sky,
I can feel my mother’s glow.
31 May 1990
About the translators
Austin Woerner is a Creative Fellow in Chinese-English literary translation at the University of Leeds.
Shayne Ian Man Ut is a student currently enrolled in the Conference Interpeting and Translations Studies MA course at University of Leeds.