Canto One: Divergence of Paths
Gleaming field of white marble monuments
Mom’s with Presbyterian cross
She will eternally bunk with her sailor boy
When he lays himself down to sleep
Accompanied by my two beloved daughters
I visited the day before leaving for China
A remnant of preserved plums
Blessed before Chinese ancestors’ tomb
Delivered across the deep
An offering between bloodlines
Shades fall across familial tablets
Fractured earth opened into an offering slot
Bronze I-Ching charm dropped into darkness
From the depths uncoiled a blue-gray spirit
Risen to bless the journey and pledge protection
Airport farewell awash with tears
Steadfast daughters must turn away
Brave souls and strong hearts overflowing with blessings
Love and assurances illuminated the path ahead
Our lives once all-one beside the other’s footsteps
A divergence of paths towards a distant reunion
Soar above the Bering Sea on destiny’s back
Before plummeting into the smelting pot
Nothingness remained
Soft ambrosia of love – an amber glow ahead
Rooted upon the known, the unknown blossomed
Disembarking, spirits coalesced
I stood in an inherited future
Testament to the enduring human spirit
Confirmation of the unbreakable will to survive
Those who held the line against annihilation
Did not surrender to death’s shadow
I too had survived devastation
My mortal spark twice nearly extinguished
But their blood granted me strength
A portion of their soul remained intact
Outside the maelstrom
Their vital energy blazed a trail and
Drew the outline of my unborn being
There could be no “I” without “them”
This mortal coil is bound to their spirits
My heart-fire is the glow of their posterity
Canto Two: Uncover the Way
Laborers eat beneath the steam-canopy of handmade noodles
Makeshift sidewalk restaurants brim with red-scarved school kids
A hundred brilliant golden caps explode from the crowd
Ramshackle facades charred with grease and motor oil
Overlook specter-farms
A thousand arcing novas erupt across the landscape
Dusty rubble piles of past homes delineate the future
As life flourishes in the cramped dominion of the jostling masses
From over the western horizon comes the hint of unfamiliar scents
Risen sun, crimson against the hoary deep
Offers no warmth to the muddy ground
Skeletal steel sentinels stretch the skyline
Clamoring higher upon ashen vapors
Orange clad street sweepers
Crumpled papers folded into their soles
Insulated against the bone-chill
Floating white heron
Featureless gray walls
Plum silhouette on a window shade
Corrugated blue ceiling
Green plastic panels
Black ceramic tiles
Brown iron pipes
Gray gutter-water
Red azaleas
The old, ever-shatter, discard and hammer out a place for the new
Disregarded and discarded the pulverized past paves the way to the future
Sidewalks crowded with bicycle carts and jerry-rigged three wheeled farmers’ cars
Hawking inexpensive vegetables, textiles and trinkets to put meat in their woks
Modernity has little impact on essential human nature
Dark beams jut up from ancient alluvial planes where
Over-spilling pestilential drainage ditches fill with waste
Subtle pathways slip through traditional landscapes
Floating temples drift overhead on a supernatural sky ocean
Inherent potentiality emerges to transform posterity
Notebook paper softens – its recycled content trying to convert back to sticks and old newspapers
The pen gouges into the page like a twig writing on a leaf.
Seepage – hidden agendas, restrained emotions, and constrained thoughts seep through crumbling mortar
The grit that now restricts brick and slab a past edification
Stones prevail against time and tide over a lifetime and so people become stones inside
Atrophying souls grow dense, smooth and cold from social-acid-wash
The pliable power of changing times moves like a trickle or a torrent – depending upon the resistance met
Instance streams to insistence to patience to coexistence
C.E.Wheeler 
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