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TPCReview Issue 001

Piera Chen

Before Dinosaurs

To see Hong Kong’s oldest rocks, we headed up
Fall Dead Dog Hill. On our descent
boulders warmed our palms & jean
pockets, then tide let down by moon
the night before heaved beneath our feet
as we traced the coast to Bluff Head.
Like a Cantonese nickname –
Pig Head, Onion Head, come meet Bluff Head.
Except it’s a cape, tip of peninsula
the size of our parents’ living-room.
Here’s where earth has disgorged its bedrock –
sandstone washed up to land
then abandoned like infants, whereupon
it folded upon itself for four hundred million years.
And in their midst was what we’d come to see –
Devil’s Fist, a column of sediment no taller
than the taller of us on piggyback, splayed
into broken fingers at the top where spray
still runnels down.
How apt, we must all have thought
but said nothing as we posed & ripples
loitered around our ankles.
A fist raised to the sky can look political but no,
this rock couldn’t have prophesied our city
four hundred million years ago.
It’s not a skipping stone held like change
at water’s edge nor a concrete pier on a
workday morning. In the lexicon of our nostalgia,
it’s nothing, its nothingness cheering us on that day
and other days as waves leapt
& we too raised our fists to the sky.

Piera is a writer and translator from Hong Kong. She has (co-)authored some 20 travel guides for Lonely Planet, and published poems in Sky Island Journal, Anthropocene, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Voice & Verse, Canto Cutie, and elsewhere. Piera is also one of two co-translators of the Thames & Hudson-published Chinese Art Since 1970: The M+ Sigg Collection, a catalogue to a world-class collection of contemporary Chinese art. She believes that if writing is the most disembodied of the arts, travel writing and poetry are the genres that make it less so. This is why she loves both. www.pierachen.com @pierachen