Sonnet with particles of gold
by Nina Mingya Powles
Today scientists discovered the origins of gold:
the sound of egg noodles crisping up in the wok,
the garden carpeted in kōwhai petals,
the way my phone corrects raumati (summer) to rainstorm.
The day after my grandmother died was white-gold in colour.
A star explodes and wings are found among the debris
along with pieces of a character I never memorised—
our only name for her, 婆, a woman 女 beneath a wave 波.
“Drift,” she mouths softly in English, “what is drift?”
My mother translates into her language, not one of mine.
I try to make myself remember by writing 婆 over and over
on squares of paper covering the walls so I am surrounded
by the women and the water radicals they hold close.
The tips of waves touch me in my sleep.
From Magnolia 木蘭. Reproduced with kind permission from Nine Arches Press.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best First Collection 2020
Magnolia 木蘭
Nina Mingya Powles
About Nina Mingya Powles
Nina Mingya Powles (b. 1993, Wellington, Aotearoa NZ) sees Magnolia, 木蘭 as ‘partly a collection of love letters to Shanghai, but it’s also about loneliness, and about trying to retrace your steps back towards a language you’ve lost’. (木蘭, ‘Mùlán’, is the Chinese word for magnolia, the official flower of Shanghai.)
Powles is drawn to writers who treat the boundaries of genre as fluid and permeable; she has described how she prizes the moment when ‘something within the line of the poem slips, gives way, and we are pulled suddenly into a different field of language’: an excellent description of the experience of reading Magnolia, 木蘭 . She is currently working on a book of essays about bodies of water, food, migration and being mixed-race, to be published by Canongate in 2021.
Read a review of Magnolia, 木蘭 in The Guardian.
