Chris Nash is a teacher and wanderer currently living and working in Beijing where he is Head of an experimental independent school for Chinese students called Xinxuedao – the new study path. He has spent his years in China studying traditional and modern poetry and travelling in the footsteps of poets from China’s 5,000 year history. He previously lived in Italy and has followed the ways of the waves from Gibraltar to the Aegean seas. He is deeply inspired by Chinese and Mediterranean cultures of poetry as song and is looking for a poetry which transcends borders, a poetry of modern silk roads between east and west.
They’re extinct now, the endless days
Of endless parties in an endless present,
Nothing to do now, wind billowing into sails,
Lit by the holocaust embers of our failures,
But to throw ourselves for harmony into uncaring seas,
To summer away in gently swarming waves
Over santorinis of unfinished history,
To somehow smooth the coarse angular facts, their cruelties;
Called by sirens to the presence
Of your submarine urchins of desire
That surge and rest in the sea’s gyre,
Washing away these selves, so casually acquired,
To dissolve as light in the rhythm
Of the gold absolving ocean.
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Poetry in this post: © Chris Nash
Published with the permission of Chris Nash