Poetry
Yung Shue Wan Pier / Helen Bowell
Image courtesy of the author.
We’re walking the gangplank again, bumping
our suitcases over its yellow hyphens, the tang
of aeroplane on the ceilings of our mouths.
The workers are shouting, pulling the boat to, arms like rope. The air is filled with trolleys trundling and relatives hi!-ing family home,
wah, how they’ve grown, look what they’ve brought to eat. Now we’re late for dinner with
your sister, for a meal that will bridge the two years between you. Now it’s morning and
we’re rushing to catch the 10.30. There is dim
sum ahead, hours of tea and clean shopping centres. We sit by the opened windows, ask for
the breeze and the engine’s oily breath. Now we’re waking our legs from the ferry, for the
dark walk into the hills and home. Our beds
this time are in your mother’s flat. Now they’re
in your childhood home. Now the farm’s ex-
pigsty, air conditioned and new. Now we’re hurrying back to the ferry in wedding clothes
we’re trying not to sweat-mark. Your nephew’s getting married, now your niece. The air feels
like warm seawater. We drink it breathlessly
like tea. Now we’re early for the next boat because we missed the one before. We’re never early on purpose. We’re pulling Vitasoys from
the vending machine and they taste like all our
pink stationery. We’re taking a deep look with
our lungs, listening to the fishermen’s whip-
cast, their deckchairs shuffling on the pier,
their sips of Lipton Iced Tea. This is the photo
I’m trying to take: here, by the bicycles, peering
over the edge.