The Sunflower



By Bing hua
Translation by Xu yingcai

Is a newborn baby‘s
Sweet smile in its dream
Or the flower of youth
In bud ready to bloom
---- No
It's an ancient Greek nymph
Clytie
In love with the Sun
 
She loves him
So her heart turns toward him
From sunrise to sunset.
 
She loves him
So she looks up to him
Till her hair turns grey
 
Near or far
It's measured by light
Faithful and true
It's witnessed by Heaven and the Earth.
 
Van Gogh's Sunflower
Has a set value
But Clytie's
Is priceless

O
My Apollo
I love you
But conceited as I am
I can’t utter
The word love
 
All my love
Has gone hidden
In Van Gogh's paintings

My love
Is that of Clytie's
And Clytie's
Is
The sunflower

About this poem

The poem, first published in 2016.

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Written on September 11, 2016

Submitted by bing_h on August 11, 2021

Modified by bing_h on August 28, 2021

42 sec read
71

Quick analysis:

Scheme xx axxxbxxc Ddx Ddx xxex feaa bbexfg gca gaaaf
Closest metre Iambic dimeter
Characters 636
Words 132
Stanzas 9
Stanza Lengths 2, 8, 3, 3, 4, 4, 6, 3, 5

Bing Hua

Bing Hua Bing Hua is the pen name of Lihua Lu, who is also known as Rose Lu. She is an accountant in Maryland, vice president of the Chinese Poetry Association, content director of Poetry Hall. She has been called “the queen of love poetry” and “a rose in the poetic world” and her poetic style called the “Bing Hua Style”. Her poems are so influential that they are considered “Bing Hua Phenomenon”. She began writing poetry during the 1980s. Her publications include Selected Poems of Bing Hua, a bilingual work in Chinese and English published in 2019/2020, This is Love (2013), and Roses by the Stream with a Chinese edition published in 2008 and a bilingual edition published in 2019. She co-edited World Pandemic Poetry (2020) , Best Modern and Contemporary Chinese Poetry (2021), and Best Overseas Chinese Poetry (2021) with Yingcai Xu. Her poems have been translated into English, German and Korean. Two of her poems, “A Hand Fan” and “Neither out of Flighty or Levity” won the Belief in Love Golden Award in the 31st World Congress Poets Contest. “The Lotus Obsession” won the Butterfly Golden Award in the 1st World Chinese Language Love Poems Contest. In 2016 she was judged an excellent poet by the Poetry Network. Bing Hua won the China New Regression Poets award in 2017. Bing Hua’s poetic philosophy is “to see the world with the eye of nature and to express the world with the poems of nature”. more…

All Bing Hua poems | Bing Hua Books

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    "The Sunflower" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 26 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/106843/the-sunflower>.

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