Summer Poetry Pop-Up: Chan Wing-chi

A REQUIEM FOR A VOYAGE OF 100 YEARS        

                                                               End of de 19th century

                                                               Off a fishing port entry

                                                      Eight-year boy's dad’s sick death

                                                      Where mother & grandmom left

                                                   While teenager's dream to be sought

                                                  At Macau, he dared to jump on board

                                           Wooden boat sailed for cross-oceanic voyage

                                           Over the storm, in months, to a golden village

                                   For ten years plus, worked for fifteen hours every day

                                   Never in school, dreamed schooling for his kid one day

                            Selling the ID, back to hometown with dream of land property

                            For money been cheated by a learned cousin, yelling in misery

                        So left behind a three-year son/wife, voyaging 2^nd time to Ellis Island

                       Whom, with no ID, yelled by Immigration be under an arrest warrant

                   Faceless, speechless, hopeless, a body found on Hudson River, motionless 

                   His son, of US Flying Tiger, at River recalled how dad needed to be tearless

             When a voyage voicing through two continents via symphony of hundred years

             What a requiem symphonized voices of war/peace, life/death for human dears  

         Echoing to a home legacy for singing grace to the needed with a generous hospitality

         Where three great-grand kids now bowing tunes on thy heart-strings at a Capital City

                                                                             11-1-2017

   Note: Ellis Island, in Upper New York Bay, had been the gateway for each of the 12 million

  new immigrant’s entry inspection upon his/her arrival to the United States from 1892 to 1954.   

                              

Chan Wing-chi, currently chair professor for arts at the Beijing Capital Normal University.  Being a Washingtonian poet cum musician, Chan organized the Washington, DC Youth Orchestra’s ten concert tours to Europe and Asia, during his tenure as Development Director.  Also he served as consultants for National

Endowment for the Arts and China National Symphony, adjunct professor at Green Mountain College in Vermont and Shenyang Music Conservatory in China, and external examiner for New York University’s Master’s program. Spearheading to score his mind of conceptual art, minimalism and pointillism music, Chan has synchronized tonal rhyming perception in composing English poetry.  Chan’s poems had been broadcasted and recorded under the Poets & Poems Program at the Library of Congress. Meanwhile Chan’s English poems has recently been published under the Fall 2015 MiPOesias, 2018 The Federal Poet, and by the New Academia Publishing, namely Mass for Nanking’s 1937.  In 2007, Chan, as choral conductor, took a team of twelve American vocalists to participate in a Memorial Concert for the 70^th Anniversary of Nanking Massacre .