{"id":994,"date":"2011-06-06T22:21:16","date_gmt":"2011-06-06T22:21:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/poemeveryday\/?p=994"},"modified":"2017-07-11T05:48:43","modified_gmt":"2017-07-11T05:48:43","slug":"a-letter-along-the-way-by-xiwen-mai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/poemeveryday\/a-letter-along-the-way-by-xiwen-mai\/","title":{"rendered":"A Letter along the Way by Xiwen Mai"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/h1>\n

A Letter along the Way<\/h1>\n

by Xiwen Mai<\/p>\n

Dearest, tell me where the cicadas have gone.
\nDidn’t summer only exist in the past?
\nFor I see myself sitting at the window
\nyears ago, in the wild songs of cicadas
\nabout how they had waited life long
\nto find the summer unbearable, Nanjing’s summer
\nhot as a stove. In spite of all the singing,
\nthe wind would never come until the autumn.
\nI would watch the leaves of the parasol trees,
\nfor which the old Chinese city had been famous,
\nmonotonously green as if in a silent sleep,
\ntheir thick branches inherently sky-pointing
\nyet desperately blocking each other’s way
\nand thus weaving a web of shade
\nthe stove-natives saw as a blessing on the road.
\nFor a long time I hadn’t been able
\nto tell the leaves from the wind. Don’t laugh,
\nhow could the cooling power belong
\nto something invisible, I hadn’t known.<\/p>\n

Xiwen Mai has a doctorate in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan. Currently she is an Assistant Professor of English at New York Institute of Technology, Nanjing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Letter along the Way by Xiwen Mai Dearest, tell me where the cicadas have gone. Didn’t summer only exist in the past? For I see myself sitting at the window years ago, in the wild songs of cicadas about how they had waited life long to find the summer unbearable, Nanjing’s summer hot as…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[123,314],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-123","category-love-poem"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/poemeveryday\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/poemeveryday\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/poemeveryday\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/poemeveryday\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/poemeveryday\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/poemeveryday\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/994\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/poemeveryday\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/poemeveryday\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/poemeveryday\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}