What could I hear from this ancient land
Tales of women’s trials
Before the current strife of wombs
In the primal days the lonely Goddess Nuwa
Created humans from loess the yellow mud
Before women fight in every field
Mulan of the Northern Wei Dynasty disguised
as a man galloped and battled in place of her father
Before women yearn for governing throne
Empress Wu Zetian of the Tang Dynasty
led the country for forty years
And yet later in the Song dynasty
In agony women bound their feet praised
As three-inch golden lotus
Time is not an arrow but a spiral
I hear echoes of women from thousand years
waning waxing wilting waking
Xiaoly Li is a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship Grant (2022) recipient. Her poetry collection, Every Single Bird Rising (FutureCycle Press, April 2023), was a Zone 3 Press Book Award finalist. Her poetry collection, Wakening Between Worlds, will be published by Serving House Books, was a finalist in the 2023 Diode Editions Book Contests and the Word Works’ 2024 Washington Prize. Her poetry is featured, or anthologized in Crab Orchard Review, Salamander, Saranac Review, Rhino, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She was nominated for: Best New Poets, three times a Pushcart Prize, four times Best of the Net. Her website: www.xiaolyli.art.