Four pairs of Response Poems by Helen Pletts 海伦·普莱茨 and Ma Yongbo 马永波

Original Graphic Art ‘Rain as our Ally’ specially created by Amber Pletts 28th March 2025 
for Ma Yongbo and Helen Pletts’ Response Poetry.

in which we speak of the rain as an ally 

我们把雨视为盟友

“Spring rain is so consoling” — Ma Yongbo 21st March 2025

 

rain is like the continuous feet of silver threads marching;

her simple persistence will caress and love us.

In the darkness echoes have hearts of steel.

—we steal ourselves, for the longest journey

is often made down a shiny, dark street.

 

Out of the darkness, a white shape is looming

towards us like a great white boat, the poet’s ego

has left the nest; drifting like a beautiful goose ghost;

the rain alters her sequence, but she still spits downwards

and the rain runs off his blank feathers in jewels 

 

22nd March 2025

Response Poetry By Helen Pletts 海伦·普莱茨 for Ma Yongbo 马永波

Response Poetry Translated by Ma Yongbo 马永波

我们把雨视为盟友

in which we speak of the rain as an ally 

（春雨如此慰藉——马永波2025年3月21日）

雨如银线连绵不绝的脚步行进；

她朴素的坚持会抚慰和爱护我们。

黑暗中的回声有着钢铁之心。

——我们隐匿自我，因为最长的旅程

往往是在闪亮、漆黑的街道。

黑暗中，一个白色形体隐隐出现

如大船迎面而来，诗人的自我

已离开巢穴；漂游如野鹅的幽灵；

雨改变了顺序，却仍在向下倾泻

在他空白的羽毛上流淌，化作珠宝

2025年3月22日

 

 

We Take the Rain as Our Ally—in response to Helen

我们把雨视为盟友——答海伦

All these years, the rain keeps falling in the darkness  

all these years, I repeat this line  

as if the same rain keeps falling repeatedly 

I move through gaps in the rain curtains  

on streets flickering between light and shadow  

as if I’ve been walking like this all along  

 

In this rain persistent over the years, even steel sprouts  

piercing all unfinished alliance treaties  

you and I, wearing raincoats inside out, meet on every street  

exchanging fingerprints under the vast silver screen of silent films  

inventing a new grammar, letting it ignite like cigarettes

lighting up our pale handsome faces  

like two young resistance fighters during occupation  

 

Evening of 22nd March 2025

Response Poetry by Ma Yongbo 马永波 for Helen Pletts 海伦·普莱茨

Response Poetry Translated by Ma Yongbo 马永波

 

我们把雨视为盟友——答海伦

We Take the Rain as Our Ally—in response to Helen

 

多少年，雨总是在黑暗中落下

多少年，我重复着这个句子

仿佛同一场雨反复落下

我穿过雨幕的间隙行进

在忽明忽暗的街道

仿佛我一直在这样走着

 

在这样持续经年的雨中，钢铁也会发芽

穿透所有未完成的同盟条约

我和你，反穿雨衣，在每一条街道上相遇

交换指纹，在巨大的默片银幕下

发明一种新的语法，让它像烟头依次照亮

我们苍白而英俊的脸

像占领时期两个年轻的抵抗战士

 

2025年3月22日傍晚

 

First published by International Times.IT 5th April 2025

in which we speak of the rain as an ally — for Ma Yongbo 我们把雨视为盟友——致马永波 海伦•普莱茨 | IT

TWO

Catamaran—A Birthday Poem for Helen Pletts 

双体船——给海伦·普莱茨的生日诗

A year has passed, and your birthday falls in the cold of early spring，

on this day, we meet in the darkness of the Seven Seas

two small boats light their undying lanterns for one another. 

We converse across an abyss, yet almost without any distance. 

Our words are lotuses blooming in the night, 

drifting back and forth between us, in their hearts 

sleeps a baby named Peace. 

Often we need to say nothing at all, 

we pause our paddles, listening to the flow of water, 

listening to the call that comes from a shared source— 

“To restore an ancient language, an art on the brink of extinction!” 

So you raise a white sail, like a dove’s wing, 

so I spread a black sail, like a swift’s wing. 

Our keels endure the capricious changes above the Seven Seas. 

And thus, like the shifting of day and night, 

Our twin-hull boat of poetry withstands the storm and exile, 

Finally arriving at that eternal shore, the homeland of rainbows. 

February 12, 2025

Response Poetry by Ma Yongbo 马永波 

Response Poetry Translated by Ma Yongbo 马永波

双体船——给海伦·普莱茨的生日诗

Catamaran—A Birthday Poem for Helen Pletts 

一年过去了，你的生日在寒冷的早春，这一天

我们相遇在七海之上的茫茫黑暗之中

两条小船为彼此亮起了不灭的灯盏

我们隔着深渊交谈，却又几乎没有任何间隔

我们的话语是黑夜中绽放的莲花

在我们之间来回漂移，花心里

睡着一个叫做和平的婴儿

时常我们不需要说什么，我们

停下手中的桨，倾听水的流逝

倾听从一个共同的源头传来的召唤——

“要恢复一门古老的语言，一门接近失传的艺术！”

于是，你撑起一面白帆，像鸽子的翅膀

而我张开一面黑帆，像雨燕的翅膀

我们的龙骨经受住了七海之上的变幻无常

就这样，两个翅膀如同昼夜交替

我们诗的双体船，抗住了风暴与流亡

终于抵达了那永恒的边岸，彩虹的故乡

2025年2月12日晨

when the sea is calmer than the stilled thoughts of two

—with permitted dashes—Helen’s birthday poem thank you for Yongbo

当海洋比两人静止的思绪更为平静时

——允许使用破折号——海伦的生日诗，向永波致谢

when the sea is calmer than the stilled thoughts of two,

we take up our paddles and point them towards the harbour.

The rainbows flicker like colours in black oil on the water;

a black you as a still swift’s call, calling to white me as a wavy dove’s sail,

and the sail is also a curved white ear that hears you calling.

And breeze carries the song gently in her cupped hands

around our softness and feathers — smoothing the sea for the little boat;

rainbow colours racing their iridescence towards land before us 

12th February 2025, very late at night

Response Poetry by Helen Pletts 海伦·普莱茨

Response Poetry Translated by Ma Yongbo 马永波

当海洋比两人静止的思绪更为平静时

——允许使用破折号——海伦的生日诗，向永波致谢

when the sea is calmer than the stilled thoughts of two

—with permitted dashes—Helen’s birthday poem thank you for Yongbo

当海洋比两人平静的思绪更为平静时，

我们拿起自己的浆，指向港口。

彩虹像黑油中的色彩在水面上闪烁；

一片黑色如雨燕，呼唤白色的我，如波动的鸽帆，

那帆也是一只弯弯的白色耳朵，聆听着你的呼唤。

微风轻轻地将歌声捧在她的双手中

围绕着我们的柔软和羽翼——为小船抚平海洋；

彩虹以绚烂的色彩竞相奔向我们前方的陆地。

2025年2月12日，深夜

First published by International Times.IT 22nd February 2025

Catamaran—A Birthday Poem for Helen Pletts 双体船——给海伦·普莱茨的⽣ ⽇诗 | IT

THREE

When I discover winter 当我发现冬天时

When I discover winter, it has already been seen many times,

like a little grey car appearing then reappearing

on the same tree lined road. The trees are dipped in white

and radiate in the headlights at night.

I discover the axes of ice, I tip them from the stone birdbaths

onto the ground, where they try to take my toes.

In Prague, I slide helplessly across the pavements,

grasping the coats of strangers, and they in turn grasping at mine

and grasping at every fence and railing;

black ice in a black and glistening mirror refuses to be held.

Unstoppable strange white faces; gliding towards you 

like white lamplight across a dark river.

24th January 2025

Response Poetry by Helen Pletts 海伦·普莱茨 for Ma Yongbo 马永波

当我发现冬天时When I discover winter

当我发现冬天时，它已经被目睹过很多次了，

像一辆灰色的小汽车出现又消失

在同一条林荫大道。树木沉浸在白色中

在夜晚的头灯中辐射出来。

我发现了冰的斧头，我把它们从石头鸟盆里

倾倒在地上，在那里，它们试图带走我的大脚趾。

在布拉格，我无助地在人行道上滑行，

抓着陌生人的外套，他们反过来也抓住我

抓住每一根篱笆和栏杆；

黑色的冰在一面闪耀的黑镜中拒绝被掌控。

不可阻挡的陌生白脸；向你滑过来

像白色的灯穿过一条黑色的河流。

2025年1月24日

When I discover winter 当我发现冬天时

When you discover winter, it has already melted and refrozen countless times, 

like faint breath on a windowpane. 

The thawed road glistens, silver knife-fish lying on stones, 

manhole covers’ steaming round sunken eyes. 

Trees at dusk shed their luminous burdens. 

Ice cracks underfoot, the sudden loss of balance echoes, 

sending tremors from the soles to the hollow bird’s nest above. 

In Harbin, strangers balance like penguins, 

limbs flailing, synchronised with ice and laughter that means no harm. 

The river wears a numbed mask, like a failed assassin, 

each pale face a reflection, gliding by one after another, 

detached from its swollen body, ahead of several swiftly tilting railings. 

24th January 2025

Response Poetry by Ma Yongbo 马永波 for Helen Pletts 海伦·普莱茨

Response Poetry Translated by Ma Yongbo 马永波

当我发现冬天时 When I discover winter

当你发现冬天时，它已经融化与结冻无数次了，

就像窗玻璃上微弱的呼吸。

解冻的道路闪闪发光，银色的刀鱼躺在石头上，

井盖的圆眼睛冒出热气，凹陷，

黄昏的树木摆脱了它们明亮的负担。

脚下的冰开裂，突然失去立足点的声音，

将颤抖从脚底向上传送到空空的鸟巢。

在哈尔滨，陌生人像企鹅一般保持着平衡，

四肢舞动，与冰雪和并无恶意的笑声同步。

河流戴着麻木的面具，像一个失败的刺客，

每一张苍白的脸都是一个倒影，纷纷滑过，

脱离臃肿的身体，领先若干个迅速倾斜的栏杆的距离。

2025年1月24日

FOUR

autumn ebbs forwards 秋天退潮了

like edge of a cold tide. I leave

the warmth of bed for the shivering stairs.

Autumn moving through the house

like a silent spider, checking its legs 

around the doorways before entering.

The garden alert in the cool air,

fixes the stillness in steaming dew.

7th September 2024, by Helen Pletts 海伦·普莱茨 for Ma Yongbo 马永波

Response Poetry Translated by Ma Yongbo 马永波

秋天退潮了autumn ebbs forwards

像寒流的边缘。我离开

温暖的床，走向颤抖的楼梯。

秋天穿过房子

像一只沉默的蜘蛛，检查着自己的腿

在门口附近，在进入之前。

凉爽的空气让花园警醒，

静止在蒸腾的露水里。

2024年9月7日

Autumn Ebbs Forwards 秋天退潮了

Trailing layers of skirts. You leave 

the stiffened books for the cold doorway. 

A sense of foreboding slips into the house, 

like a quiet cat, moving through each room, 

hovering beneath every windowsill, sharpening its claws 

waiting silently for the moment the moon passes through the walls. 

The empty courtyard opens towards the fields, 

you will stop at the door, listening to the rustling sound drawing nearer.

February 3, 2025, by Ma Yongbo 马永波 for Helen Pletts 海伦·普莱茨 

Response Poetry Translated by Ma Yongbo 马永波

秋天退潮了Autumn Ebbs Forwards

拖曳着层叠的裙裾。你放下

变得僵硬的书卷，走向冰冷的门口。

一种预感潜入房子里

像沉静的猫，穿过每一个房间，

在每个窗台下徘徊，磨砺它的脚爪

静静地等候月亮穿墙而过的时刻。

空荡的庭院向田野敞开

你将在门口止步，谛听那渐渐逼近的沙沙之声

2025年2月3日

Joint Bio’s :

Helen Pletts www.helenpletts.com is a British poet based in Cambridge, whose work has been translated into 11 languages. She is the English co-translator of Chinese poet Ma Yongbo, her official Chinese translator and best friend. To date, Yongbo has translated over 460 of Helen’s poems into Chinese and she is widely published in China, where contemporary painter Chen Guohuan has created a painting in response to one of her poems celebrating his painting career.

 

Ma Yongbo https://mayongbopoetry.wordpress.com/ is a Chinese poet, translator, editor, and scholar of postmodern poetry. He has authored or translated more than seventy published books. He is a professor in the Faculty of Arts and Literature at Nanjing University of Science and Technology. His translations from English include works by John Ashbery, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Herman Melville, May Sarton, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and many others. Together they create the unique and bizarre Response Poetry for International Times.IT

where their poetry is published weekly as part of the ongoing Ma Yongbo Poetry Road Trip, Summer Tour, 2025, currently at Volume 24 ! Their first bi-lingual book, entitled Night-Shining White’ is due out in 2025/26. Their first Tri-lingual poetry book with Bangla poet Quazi Johirul Islam is also due out in 2026. Helen’s poem ‘Water’ and her co-translation with Yongbo of his poem ‘Spring Stream’ are both included in the first Elemental Poetry Cambridge Anthology, entitled ‘Water’ due out from Worple Press Worple Press| Independent publisher of poetry and art titles in November 2025. Here is an informative article about the Response Poetry between Helen Pletts and Ma Yongbo written by Nasir Aijaz https://sindhcourier.com/the-combined-poetic-dialogue/

Interview with Helen Pletts and Ma Yongbo

Belinda's Review of Myths, Beasts & the Ways of Water by Clint Frakes

 Clint Frakes’s Myths, Beasts & the Ways of Water is a capacious, humane collection that moves easily between intimate lyric confession, mythic imagination, and wry, often mordant social observation. Organized in five sections—Mystery not Always Unkind; Dancing Among the Makers; Unreal Cities; Love’s Lost Horses; The Ways of Water—the book charts a life of attention: to landscape (desert mesas, Hawaiian shorelines, the Rogue and Colorado rivers), to beloved teachers and peers (Ginsberg, Snyder, Collom), and to the small, stubborn incidents that accrete into moral memory.

Frakes’s voice is muscular and eclectic. He can pare a line to imagistic precision (“The Chinese business lady…holds up her golden retriever’s tail / as it shits straight into a Macy’s bag”) and also luxuriate in long, incantatory sequences—the book’s myth-poems and ritual narratives—which read like sustained meditations on belonging and loss. The “Desire” series and longer elegies (notably “Father Fisheye”) show his gift for mixture: humor and grief, vernacular energy and learned allusion. There is a recurring ethical core—attention to indigenous presence, ecological grief, and the residue of American violences—that prevents the collection from mere aesthetic play.

Formally, Frakes is resourceful. He uses short imagistic lyrics, prose-adjacent narratives, litany, and occasional collage; his diction ranges from colloquial bluntness to mythic lyricism. His influences—Beat candor, eco-poetics, Native and Romantics threads—are audible but never derivative: he retools them into poems that feel lived-in rather than performative. At their best, poems like “Chelonia mydas,” “Rogue River Redemption,” and “What the River Dreams” combine natural history, careful observation, and spiritual longing into lines that linger.

What the River Dreams

We carry a tune & often desert it on high

plains amid fencing light & shadow.

It won’t matter for long what I felt or where—

like how water can only fall into itself

each rain, bluer for the turn.

Maybe you finally had enough—

yet the road to which you’ve sewn yourself

touches what you never could have loved alone.

The breath of our lives persists

beyond all foreseen destinations.

The old ones say the water never began

& cannot end, that it garners the memory

of every thread & station it’s met—

from the bellies of stars to the viscera of willow.

From my chosen hill, it’s hard to imagine

its stiller parts beneath the ripple.

What this river dreams is what I long to say.

Overall, Myths, Beasts & the Ways of Water is a generous, restless book: attentive, politically minded, rooted in place and relationship, and rewarding for readers who value stewardship, elegy, and a poet willing to mix the sacramental with the profane.

Recommended for readers of contemporary American lyric who appreciate ecological awareness, cross-cultural commentary, and a poet comfortable with both tenderness and provocation.

Where Lies the Passage of Light

after Ammons

“The light became her grace and dwelt among

Blind eyes and shadows that are formed as men;

Lo, how the light doth melt us into song…”

—Ezra Pound, “Ballatetta”

I have considered how light spills without intent,

exposing all surface it surveys

& how the mule deer’s dark morning legs

defy nothing as she nibbles bitter shoots.

Undisguised at my backdoor, light asks nothing

& marks the foreheads of the hills

while I slaughter hourly beasts by its rhythm to weave

another day’s geography of purpose.

I watched the cottonwood leaves rot in the blond grass

under fat beads of October dew.

Only weeks ago I bathed in the spinning silver

they gathered from their tree—

drinking the magnetic river that now pulls them low.

A spider darts along the twinkling curtain rod

that staves the rays that bare all shape

& slant eddies of meaning.

Breath deepens toward the need for meat & grain.

I am certain what should be cleaned & what gathered:

children to be taught their great ascent.

Nothing escapes the trail of Earth’s cascade

as I turn toward & away from comforts & pains—

my ears ringing in their own hollows.

Dawn’s horses shake their manes

against the spectrum of wide tomorrows.

The heart is a basket of such flutters,

passed from night to this

& stars will fade into light’s excess.

Clint Frakes is a poet, writer, teacher, editor, ceremonialist and naturalist living in Sedona, AZ since 1992. His poetry, prose and narrative non-fiction has appeared in over 100 journals, magazines and anthologies in the US, Canada, UK, Australia and Argentina since 1987.  He was named one of the 50 Best New Poets of 2008 by former American Poet Laureate, Mark Strand, and also received the Josephine Darner Distinguished Poet Prize (2008). Other awards include the James Vaughan Poetry Prize (2006), The Pudding House Chapbook Prize (2008) and the Peggy Ferris Memorial Prize for Poetry (2006). 

He is a graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics of the Naropa Institute (1989), Northern Arizona University creative writing program (1994) and received his Ph.D. with emphasis in creative writing from the University of Hawaii (2006). He is the former Chief Editor of The Hawaii Review and Big Rain. He has taught in Writing and English programs across the country. Clint specializes in nature writing and spiritual memoir.

GAS Featured Poet: Sreeja Naskar

 

Sreeja Naskar is a young poet based in India. Her work has appeared in Poems India, Crowstep Journal, ONE ART, Ink Sweat and Tears, FRiGG, The Chakkar, and elsewhere. She believes in the quiet power of language to unearth what lingers beneath silence.

kissing with the news on mute

the apartment smells like garlic & rain.    

    we eat pasta off chipped plates  

 while gaza buries its children beneath the rubble.  

     you kiss me like there’s no ash in the air  

 and the water running through our pipes  

      didn’t skip someone else’s throat to get here.  

 

           you say: stay.   

           & i do, because the world is too loud 

 

 we turn the tv on, just for the light.  

     the anchor's mouth moves, silent.  

 i think about a girl with red barrettes,  

     found under concrete. i think about  

         the mother who washed her with bottled water.  

 i think of my own mother, folding towels  

     while the country she left burns slower  

         than the one she fled.  

 

           (sometimes survival is shame  

           that learned how to walk upright.)  

 

 my shower runs hot.  

     i cry into the tile & say, it’s cleansing.  

 i scroll past headlines, donate five dollars,  

       feel righteous, then kiss you again.  

 my body forgets how to hold grief  

     so it folds into yours.  

 

            (what language do we use  

             for pleasure that costs someone else’s breath?  

 

 outside, the rain keeps falling.  

     somewhere, a city turns off its sirens.  

 you whisper my name like a prayer  

     and i want to believe it’s enough.  

 i want to believe loving you  

     isn’t the most selfish thing i’ve done today.  

 

           (but the water runs hot  

           and the sky, for now, is whole)

 god works in immigration

denied my mother’s visa three times—  

    each refusal a prayer unanswered.  

i watch the clock punch holes in our grief,  

     stamped with expiration dates,  

the smell of waiting rooms stale as old promises.  

 

           (he never learned how to say my name.)  

 

god sits behind a desk cluttered with files,  

     his hands folding paper dreams into ash.  

my father’s papers lost somewhere between  

     midnight and the next form,  

i lost faith the day they lost his identity.  

 

           (there’s no heaven here  

           just endless lines and locked doors)  

 

i call god by the wrong name,  

     curse him in the language he forgot.  

my mother folds towels with hands trembling—  

     each crease a silent protest  

against a god who trades in red stamps, not mercy.  

 

the walls listen but do not answer.  

     outside, the city breathes without us.  

i fold my grief into a suitcase,  

     tuck my name inside like a secret,  

hoping god forgets how to open it.

 diaspora is a scam

  my aunt says it over bitter tea—  

     how they sold us dreams wrapped in passports,  

  promises folded like cheap paper planes,  

     crashing somewhere between here and nowhere.  

 

          they told us it was freedom,  

          but freedom never comes with baggage fees  

 

  i learned to speak two languages that don’t quite fit,  

     my tongue a clumsy translation of home and exile.  

  my mother’s cooking tastes like memory and loss,  

     the same dishes nobody knows how to name anymore.  

 

         (we are strangers in maps we didn’t draw)  

 

  every flight ticket is a wager on belonging,  

     but the currency is too high—  

  a lifetime of waiting rooms,  

     missed birthdays,  

     empty chairs at tables still warm with absence.  

 

          diaspora is a scam  

          sold by those who never had to leave  

 

  my father’s laugh is thinner now,  

     stretched between two countries,  

  one that forgot him,  

     the other that never fully claimed him.  

 

          and i—  

          caught in the middle—  

          wonder if home was ever real  

 

  i hold my heart like a visa application—  

     folded, stamped,  

     always pending.

Su Zi's Review of PLANT DREAMING DEEP by May Sarton

 

On reading May Sarton Plant Dreaming Deep

It might happen that to the hand comes a book: hardbound with cloth, dustjacket long gone. The tightly woven canvas of the book is green and has a texture; the book has feel. The inside cover is still tight and green and gracefully sun struck. Thumbing the text against the palm is a remembrance of high-quality paper, of books with deckled edges. Suddenly, there is also the remembrance of how one reads such books—with care for both the entity and the words within.

The volume has a 1968 copyright, and photographs. Prior to generic pixels, means of reproduction involved plates, and this book has a number of them: of the author across from the title page, across from each of the fifteen chapters. It is a testament to the prowess of the publisher then to have been able to release such a book; and there the crest of  WWNorton.

Of course, an AI overview of the work at hand is infuriatingly superficial, but not untrue—let consideration for such broad gloss not be here. Yes, the work is a memoir of buying a house in the middle of the twentieth century—readers will gasp at the minuscule monetary amounts mentioned. Nor ought to readers, getting a glimpse of the list of previous publications, be surprised that the author, May Sarton, is readable. What becomes striking about the work becomes its nuances—as if coming across the volume itself—once a ubiquitous version of a book, now a vintage treasure—were not clue of serendipity enough.

Sarton’s reason for buying a house begins with her commitment to her ancestry: “ I enjoy beginning this chronicle with an evocation of two ancestors because in this house all the threads i hold in my hands have at last been woven together into a whole” (19), but she purchases her particular house in a remote location because of a bird

[...]under a stand of old maples, and there, a little back from the road, behind its semicircular drive, withdrawn from the village itself, stood the house. [...]The whole impression was one of grace and light within a classical form, and i was so bedazzled by this presence that for a moment i could only see, not hear. But then I heard it—an oriole, high up in one of the maples, singing his song of songs” (28)

For any bird lovers, Sarton beguiles aplenty throughout the seasons; she maintains feeders in winter “And sooner or later I must push hard to open the front door against the drifts and get myself out with seed for the bird feeders” (86), and weaves these perceptions with ones about solitude and the life of a writer.

Sarton also gardens, because she: “considers flowers a necessity, quite as necessary as food. So from spring until late October i spend the hour just after breakfast in the garden, [...]for whenever I look for the rest of the day there is always somewhere a shaft of light on flowers, and I feel them strongly as part of the whole presence of the house” (57). 

 It might seem, to those who are quintessentially transient, to be so thoroughly stay at home, and to do so in solitude. Sarton does socialize—she has guests, and becomes participatory in her community, but she also travels to teach. There might be some who consider Sarton’s determined retreat to be quaint; others might find themselves already in the solitude of which Sarton speaks. Certainly, the perceptions here are worthy for many reasons, giving Sarton’s simultaneously simplistic and complex style her worthy iconic status.

Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.

                     

Check out her author page on Amazon.