Firenze and Beijing

translated by PLS

orientalists imagine

the love of foreign poets

is crucial to a European city

they are wrong

poets don’t love the cities

they only adore women

“this is not bad

it’s still the love of the civilised”

the imaginations continue as they mumble

yet there doesn’t seem to be a way

for Caravaggio and the mural inside the Basilica of San Marco to stop

the barbarous and spacious wailing in the theodolite

not to differentiate

whether it’s the cheap emotions of primitives, or

the failure of humanism

years later, a map with all the ruins labelled

is handed to a strategist who ignores the contour line

to let him bury the history in the fall of the homeland

1. Firenze and Beijing - 杰