Morning headaches are set to blow up my brain
The extra gift of great machines
The blame is not on the metals
It’s my ageing and brittle nerves
I get no guts up to examine my living
It’s hardened, in metallic black
Sharp as the point of air chipper
A light hit will let stones bleed
I fritter my midlife away five kilometers in mountains
By breaking boulders layer by layer
It’s the times to recompose myself over and over
My lowly family lives at the foot of Mt. Shang
Their sick bodies are wrapped in dirt
I believe how much lifespan cut back from me
How much will be added to theirs
I’ve kept three tons of dynamite inside
My family as the fuse
It was set off last night at their bedside
Where I shattered, like a rock exploded
早晨起来头像炸裂一样疼
这是大机器的额外馈赠
不是钢铁的错
是神经老了脆弱不堪
我不大敢看自己的生活
它坚硬铉黑
有风镐的锐角
石头碰一碰就会流血
我在五千米深处打发中年
我把岩层一次次炸裂
借此把一生重新组合
我微小的亲人 远在商山脚下
他们有病身体落满灰尘
我的中年裁下多少
他们的晚年就能延长多少
我身体里有炸药三吨
他们是引信部分
就在昨夜在他们床前
我岩石一样轰地炸裂一地
（陈年喜）
CHEN NIANXI (Born in 1970) once worked as a rock miner for more than 15 years across China before his health worsened and he was diagnosed with pneumoconiosis. He started writing poetry about three decades ago, and has emerged as one of the best-known practitioners of a relatively new genre in China: migrant worker literature. Chen was invited to speak in U.S. ivy league universities in 2016 after the release of a documentary called The Verse of Us, which features Chen and five other migrant worker poets. Besides poems and essays, he has widely published in China’s influential literary journals, his two critically acclaimed books are poetry collection Demolitions Record in 2019, and most recently, a book of essays, To Live Is to Shout at the Sky.
L.B. TSAU is a New York-based financial journalist with a passion for poetry, also a member of the PEN Chinese Writers Abroad Center. Her Chinese poems have been published widely in Chinese newspapers, literature magazines and poetry anthologies in New York, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the mainland China, etc. Her poems and essays received honorary mentions from the Sino Literature magazine in 2019 and 2020 , and also from the First Chinese Immigrant Literary Contest sponsored by the Chinese Writers Association of New York in 2021.
