22/11/2025
In an upcoming issue of 聲韻詩刊 Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, we will publish an English-language section on 🅆🄷🄸🅃🄴.
Robert Black's "White Oxen of the Sun (no. 1)" and "White Oxen of the Sun (no. 2)" will be included.
{{{ We are accepting submissions until Sunday 28 December 2025; please note that the submission window may close earlier: https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1267874378691811 }}
𝑅𝑜𝑏𝑒𝑟𝑡 𝑜𝑛 ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑝𝑜𝑒𝑚𝑠:
❀ The poems “White Oxen of the Sun (1)” and “White Oxen of the Sun (2)” form part of a three-poem sequence from my book manuscript Beneath the Milky Green Sun. They focus on my life, and on my family’s experience, as white children living in Taiwan who eventually returned to the United States with a deeply rooted Asian identity and awareness that endures to this day, as I continue to travel back to Taiwan and Hong Kong.
My brothers and I spent most of our childhood as outsiders, isolated from the wider society and, at times, from others as a means of self-protection. We tended to keep to ourselves, the four of us together rather than mingling with other children. This was especially significant when we were very young, travelling between Taiwan and the United States and moving from place to place within the States. Every summer, we lived with our grandparents, away from our parents and classmates. These were summers of splendid isolation, without friends, but enriched by the companionship we found solely in one another.
This unity shielded us from the differences between us and other children our age, and from much of the world around us, as we struggled through our mother’s hospitalisation for mental illness and my parents’ divorce at a time when none of our friends’ families seemed to be breaking apart. We were also navigating the diverse ethnic environments in which we often lived and the pronounced age gap between our summer guardians, our grandparents, and us as children.
We were often regarded as special or were remarked upon by strangers as “those four beautiful boys”, four brothers born in quick succession who did everything together and appeared carefree. We were said to play with joy and athletic laughter and to be physically beautiful, something I never felt. Yet now, as an adult, looking at photographs of us in Taiwan and the United States, I can understand why strangers and relatives saw those four children as “those beautiful boys”.
As children, we needed one another’s company as we moved from place to place, home to home, and we required one another’s protection to shield us from grief, from my mother’s hospitalisation, from relatives arguing over who would raise us, from our own unruly rebellion, and from other deep fissures that have marked each of us in significant ways. Those scars persist in adulthood, shaping our lives and those of our families. My own sense of confusion and isolation, as well as the bifurcation of my identity—Asian and North American—continues to this day. At times I feel more deeply connected to Taiwan than to the United States, and at other times I am more firmly drawn westward. It remains an unending rupture that appears in my writing and in my personal life.
“White Oxen of the Sun” finds its central metaphor in the herds of cattle owned and guarded by the Greek sun god Helios, who plays a significant role in Homer’s The Odyssey. Helios’s cattle are killed and sacrificed by Odysseus’s crew on their journey home, and this act has a profound impact on the lives of the men and on Odysseus; it contributes to further suffering and prolongs his voyage.
The Odyssey has been one of the most important books of my life, for it first opened literature to me when I read it at fourteen. Odysseus’s ten-year journey felt akin to my own when I first encountered the poem and continues to mirror my peripatetic existence, a life marked by homelessness and continual travel. To this day, I have still not found a true home, though my own Ithaca seems divided between Taiwan—where I saw my first cow on the slopes of Yangmingshan—and the childhood summers when my brothers and I lived with our grandparents by the Atlantic Ocean.
“White Oxen of the Sun” also alludes to a chapter in Joyce’s Ulysses, the tripartite section renowned for its shifting difficulty and style corresponding to the cycle of life. My own poem, in its three parts, attempts to grapple with both the conventional and unconventional tropes of poetic narration, at times parodying classical poetry and its elevated language, and at other times employing enumeration of stanza and experience, with the lexical direction shifting between birth and death. Across the three poems in “White Oxen of the Sun” I tried to move through voice and emotion, narration and perspective, oscillations between heightened language and the quotidian, and transitions among the roles of lover, child, brother, parent, grandparent, and a more general omniscience.
I am not certain this three-poem cycle succeeds. Indeed, it most likely fails to express what I had hoped to convey, yet I wished to write something that spoke, at least in part, to the difficulty of articulating my thoughts on familial grief and fluctuating identity, on attempting to understand what renders a place meaningful in a life shaped by profound loss: the loss of parental love and of childhood, of national identity and language, much of which remains unresolved in my own life.
Taiwan, my brothers, Homer, Joyce, poetry, cows. These are the bones and pasture that make up this poem. Is it hubris to attempt to bring them together in a poetic sequence? I do not know, but I have tried.
I am indebted to the poet and editor Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, another writer whose life bridges East and West, who has so graciously seen fit to publish my poem. I am profoundly grateful.
🖋️ Born in California, 𝐑𝐨𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐭 𝐁𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐤 is an award-winning poet and photographer who resides in Toronto, Canada. Having lived in seven countries, including part of his childhood in Taipei, Taiwan, his work often explores bifurcated identity and the rootlessness of language. His poetry and short stories have been published in the United States, Canada, France, Russia, Spain, the United Kingdom, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and Australia. He was a finalist for the OmniPress Book Award. He is seeking a publisher for his first poetry manuscript and is currently working on a second poetry collection as well as a children’s book.
◯◯◯◯◯◯◯◯◯◯
SUBSCRIBE to 𝑉𝑜𝑖𝑐𝑒 & 𝑉𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑒 𝑃𝑜𝑒𝑡𝑟𝑦 𝑀𝑎𝑔𝑎𝑧𝑖𝑛𝑒 or
BUY individual issues: https://vvpoetry.com/subscription/
VISIT 𝑉𝑜𝑖𝑐𝑒 & 𝑉𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑒 𝑃𝑜𝑒𝑡𝑟𝑦 𝑀𝑎𝑔𝑎𝑧𝑖𝑛𝑒 website:
https://vvpoetry.com/
◯◯◯◯◯◯◯◯◯◯
