Our Father in Heaven

Growth ⇿ Tearing ⇿ Pain Poetry as a prolonged process of understanding, a perpetually deferred response. "When the third person falls, Do not deceive me: continue to believe in the future." — "Plundering Life" "Command yourself: not only to grow into a tree, But to grow into shade, into a small silence That allows for your presence." — "Jazz Pool" "Our Father in Heaven" is the latest work by Hong Kong author Li Ka-yi, following her previous book "Exposure." It is also her first collection of poetry, encompassing the majority of her poems written to date. The collection is named after the opening line of the Lord's Prayer, "Our Father in Heaven...", aiming to draw readers into a state of contemplation: an individual continuously directs questions upwards to an unknown, vast entity, interspersed with narratives, doubts, and complaints... Through this series of prolonged questioning, it probes the formation of life and self, traces the trajectory of growth and struggle, and attempts to achieve wholeness. Within this crucible, we discover that whether reading or writing poetry, we can experience a delayed sense of comprehension, which serves as the ultimate reward. This means that all pain, joy, confusion, anger, fantasy, reality, and fiction can be unified and understood within an elegantly arranged, obscure system. It implies that through expression, poets and readers alike can, within the infinite space of "poetry," transform compressed, amplified, recreated, distorted, and processed words into their own realities, allowing poetry to seek a perpetually deferred response within our long journey of understanding. — "Afterword: Becoming the Weakest God in the Stature of One" "Our Father in Heaven" endeavors, in the form of a poetry collection, to continuously explore the most suitable modes of expression for poets within this deferred space, guiding readers and poets together with the direction and constraints of a subtle compass, to co-create their own life symbols.