A Half Winter Sonnet

In response to The Living Poetry prompt – Summer/Winter, I produced a half sonnet. The reason I called it half is because I managed 7 lines, 10 syllabus each line, with no iambic pentameter or rhyme. 🤪

You came in the deep of the darkest night
The leaves stripped off the trees by violence
You sealed their fate with humiliation
Snow white wedding gown on threadbare body
The bride weeped bitterly in her slender
Larmenting her beauty taken by you
Your treacherous hands ruined the most pure

Blue Knot

He often looks up the calming blue sky
That’s the clarity he holds on to
combating the tangled emotions he lives with

He has been him for so long
and he has been fighting this complex battle ever since
He cannot comprehend it all
not now or not ever
Some past is best left undiscovered
and some history is best unknown

He loves the blue sky as his earliest memory
He remembers looking up from the darkness and he saw the same clear blue sky

Writer’s note about Blue Knot
Knot – adults survived child trauma and abuse often experience complex trauma resembles a knot
Blue – the colour of the sky resembles hope

The Blue Knot Foundation Australia resources and services

Ten Minutes Sun and Letting God

She walked along the strip in front of her apartment
back and forth, back and forth slowly
with a tender back
It’s worth it
and all she could manage
ten minutes in the sun
in the middle of Winter

There was no work to go to
no appointment to attend
no fund to go out
Everything in life at that point
was out of her control
She had never learned to be doing nothing
up until that Winter

It was a humbling experience indeed
There was no help from anyone
when everyone else was experiencing more or less the same thing:
jobless and soon to be homeless

Now she is sitting in the garden of a women’s refugee
ten minutes in the sun
in the beginning of Summer
and she manages a few thanksgiving and prayer
She happily handed all control to the Boss upstairs
after she realised through all that
she was kept warm, well fed and the sun has been shining

Patience Expired

She lost him long time ago
ever since she deflected
whenever he asked her
what she was really thinking

桑树下的恋人 Under the Mulberry Tree

记得那年仲夏的傍晚
漫天的青绿彩云见证
桑树下我们互相许愿
我们的爱情果实累累
如今我独自旧地重游
透熟的桑果额前嘲讽
三十来年的果盛果落
黑发的恋人如今鬓白
我们的爱情早已消失
如桑果从纯白到紫黑
Remember that summer evening
under the mulberry tree
sky full of green and cyan clouds
witnessed our pledge of love
would be like the ripen mulberries

Now I am revisiting the scene alone
the heavy mulberries dangling on my forehead
laughing at my naiveté

We were once young and pure
three decades of success and failure
we are now with silvery temples
our love had long been bruised
like the dark purple mulberries

Beach Boy

Pencil drawing of Ben at Balmoral Beach, NSW Australia

黑暗的流星 (Meteor Blackout)

我一直在寻找暮夜里的繁星
竟然忘却了绵长的南方雨季
当碎星们尽力吸引我的目光
我却忽略了他们互放的光芒


I've been searching for the glorious stars in the ebony sky
forgetting the prolonged Southern monsoon season.

When the shooting stars gathered to attract my attention,
I was blind to their unifying light 
and missed the splendid meteor.