Our series of poetry excerpts continues with a poem by Tina Chang from her new book, Hybrida. “Mankind Is So Fallible” is a lovely, ambitious poem about the mysteries of belief. Chang’s lines are simultaneously gentle but jarring: we are eased into the murky and mystical place of faith. In Chang’s poem, the narrator’s mother sets aside God—”She no longer believed in the unseen”—leading the narrator to wonder with what one might replace the divine. Perhaps belief “could be as simple as sleep, curling inward / toward an avalanche of hummingbirds.” This poem thrums like that small, beautiful bird’s wings.

“Mankind Is So Fallible”

We lie down to the day as if we could flee

from the body’s burden. On the ground are notes,

candles, a saint’s face painted alive with gold.

Where does God live if not in the shadows

of struggle, marching next to the living,

with battlements and a slogan, knowing

faintly more than we do? Someone dispatches

a call for help. Someone notes the patches

on a man’s jacket. Somewhere there is a circle

of people praying and dying at once, the loss

of which makes a narrative rain down

in news feeds across frames of light.

~

My mother once gave up her savior,

walked into our living room to profess

her love for the here and now.

She no longer believed in the unseen,

could no longer bow to invisible idols.

She sat on the chair in front of me

more mortal than she ever was,

face lit with resolve, done with faith,

done with the promise of rapture.

Somewhere, glass breaks

and the one who shatters it

wears a mask of God’s many faces.

~

How would the body be summoned

if we started over? Imagine a blank book

in which the body is drawn.

Would the body lie horizontal like a violin

whose music plays off-key or would it stand

upright like a totem pole against its own weather?

I place a book under my pillow

as the ancient Japanese courtesans did

to dream the body into being.

Wind gathers from the past until I am walking

in snow. The arms and legs move in unison

with the mind, an engine of sinew and meat.

How should I draw it, not the body

but what it contains. Not its contours

but its tensions. Not its stew of blood

and clattering bones but its promise.

I prefer now to think of the body’s debt

and what it owes to the ledger of the living.

~

I imagine the courtesans rising from sleep,

hair rushing to the waist like ink. They rub

their eyes of dream, tighten their robes

as they lift the book from beneath their pillow

as if urging a stone from its bedrock.

How would they think of the body then,

having wakened from that place

one could describe as near death.

Instead, the body startles forward toward infinity.

~

The courtesan runs her hand along the page,

feels the blank space, an urgent bell summons her.

Dips her brush in ink and draws a line through emptiness.

When a young man enters a church,

he seeks a furnace to burn away his hatred

and a foundation on which to kneel.

He seeks his mother’s mercy

and his father’s vengeance. He passes through

the doors and we call this worship.

If it could be as simple as sleep, curling inward

toward an avalanche of hummingbirds, the mind

freeing itself as the body lets go its earthly wreckage.

If it could be like enduring the wholeness of a dream

so real we dissolve into a veil of the past,

wind dragged backward, so brutal in its disappearance.

Reprinted from Hybrida: Poems. Copyright © 2019 by Tina Chang. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.