The year's best poems: The Window by Mary Jean Chan
Ahead of this year’s Forward Prizes for Poetry, The Telegraph is publishing the five nominees for the Best Single Poem prize. Today's poem comes from Mary Jean Chan.
Born in Hong Kong in 1990 and now living in London, Chan wrestles with questions of identity in her first collection, Flèche. "We are defined against something, by what we are not and will never be," she writes in the preface, adding, "This is a book of love poems."
With passion and intellectual precision, in Flèche Chan explores many kinds of love – her love for fencing, for Shakespeare's plays, for her family – returning most often to her love of women, and her mother's struggle to come to terms with the poet's sexuality. Love can be painful, and Chan acknowledges that in The Window – a highlight of the book – while ultimately insisting that love is still "the easiest thing – even on the hardest of days".
The Window by Mary Jean Chan
after Marie Howe
Once in a lifetime, you will gesture
at an open window, tell the one who
detests the queerness in you that dead
daughters do not disappoint, free your
sore knees from inching towards a kind
of reprieve, declare yourself genderless
as hawk or sparrow: an encumbered body
let loose from its cage. You will refuse your
mother’s rage, her spit, her tongue heavy
like the heaviest of stones. Your mother’s
anger is like the sun, which is like love,
which is the easiest thing – even on the
hardest of days. You will linger, knowing
that this standing before an open window
is what the living do, that they sometimes
reconsider at the slightest touch of grace.
The Window was first published as second prize winner in the 2017 National Poetry Competition, and also appears in Mary Jean’s debut collection, Flèche (Faber & Faber, 2019).
