each flushed with protests
against frost coming all too soon

Buddha puts you there
to guard an entire season
but we will relocate you
to guard our rented houses

the last of a fast-fading landscape
the last to ripen

Changming Yuan grew up in rural China and currently teaches writing in Vancouver. His poems appear (or soon will do so) in Barrow Street, Best Canadian Poetry (2009), the Cortland Review, and nearly 200 other literary publications worldwide. Leaf Garden Press recently published his first collection of verse, Chansons of a Chinaman.