Poetry

Portugal (2001)

Portuguese
Like a Paris concierge
Like tumbling ochre
Tangle of Lisbon in films
And fado
Near Faro
Villages and oranges
And life baked dry
Scraggy water-starved sadness
Club Med golf course
Men in suits
And then casual for the corrida
Global golfing sailing men at rest
With only the pines to whisper
Of Africa
Out there
Are ships of spices and gold
Fading wisp of conquering dreams
Fascists beaten with carnations
Reddened soil
Chance journey
Slavic echoes of lilting language
Soft sweep of the evening sea
Sky glowers in Wellington look
Duty free at Faro
Portuguese
Like porcelain patterns
No passport stamp to prove the stay
Rain and wind on the cliff tops
So typical
Like Island Bay
Just pretending to be Portugal

Geography Lesson (September 17, 2001)

If no man is an island
Then let me swell with names and faces
And grow fat with crowds and places
Let me keep in my forgetful eye
Those glass-clad towers grasping at the sky
If no man is an island
Make me writhe with the colic of events
Lie still to sooth the rips and rents
In my continental soul
Force my gaze to watch them fall
The human specks and unknown names,
Crumbs of my substance leapt from the flames
If even cameras gasped
Let me too choke on disbelief
Run my feet raw on shards of grief
If truly no man is an island
Then on my map of sorrows and shame
On my continental flesh I etch the names
Scar my skin with misled men and fools
Learn the island of Manhattan and the mountains of Kabul

First visit to Istanbul (2013)

Forget the exotic stuff
Sultans, harems, Constantinople
It felt like Barbes
That part of Paris of which my old landlady would say
“So full of Arabs, you don’t want to go there”
Same grey and clutter
Just the streets were steeper
Buttons in one, kid’s clothes, lingerie
Then forks and knives
Copper pots and plates
Stamps and signs and seals
Then came the printers’ shops
True, minarets topped the summits
While Barbes had the Sacre Coeur
as the rising point
Above rows of jeans, shoes, cheap t-shirts
The names had song
Laleli and Aksaray
Tulips and palaces of shining white
Only sold wholesale there
Russians came to buy in bulk
Nothing exotic
Just Barbes grown big
And spreading up and down the slopes

The Moon my Heart (2013)

The moon my heart pinned to the night
Once a Chinese poet made it his
In my nature palace on the hills
I saw it too, the moon and me
The sky my endless stream
The sea my mirror, wind my song
My eyes grown huge and casting waves
Across the world
To catch the ships and swirl of stuff
Carry it to ports and random shores
The moon my waxing waning heart
My glow and roundness perfect bright
Although we see it thin at times
That doesn’t make it less or gone
But only shows our eyes are dim
The poets on their mountain peaks
Sang simple things and culled the scenes
What harvest here in city sounds and concrete sea?
But even here the sky still speaks
Still sends its hugging dancing streams
I wake from sleep to see the slanting light
My heart hung bright above the roofs

[The poet whose words inspired that poem was Han Shan. He was a mysterious figure who, back in ninth-century China, abandoned the more conventional paths in life and went off into the hills to be a hermit. He left a collection of poems deeply infused with Buddhist and Daoist influences. Below is my translation of the one that inspired my own poem.]

The stars make rows of glowing pearls strung through the night
Up on the cliff a lonely lamp dabs one small point of light
The moon still rising, not yet riding high
So round and full, so radiant its stream
A mirror never polished, yet always just as bright
It’s my heart that hangs there in the deep and pure sky

Sad Lions (2013)

[Many old Moscow buildings are adorned with sculpted lions. Their varying expressions have always caught my eye.]

Sad lions set in Moscow stone
Watch motion streams
With lips so pulled and long
They follow people flows
Sad faces, smiles, tears and laughs
Fragments glum or grey
Sad lions sucking on spaghetti strands
Flags and symbols changed and rulers come and gone
Sad lions droop in mournful pose
Other creatures pompous proud
Puffed fat as bloated toads
Blank-eyed, hurry past
With thoughts of car parks underground
Or penthouses
And towers higher than in Shanghai
Higher than in Dubai
Their lions would be gold
The haughty sort to guard the doors
For mannered faces be the mirror glass
It wouldn’t be a Moscow thing to play
At being lions, stretch one’s lips in sorrowed pout
But then again, the merchants and the nobles
Perhaps stayed young at moments in their day

Book of Kings (2013)

Book of kings sits blind
In hallowed halls, lights dim
The evening falls on men, women, wine
The feasting tables set
No longer dress in robes and crowns of gold
They drape their titles light and loose
Prime minister or president
Here where tsars once trod mundane through rooms
Of home and daily things
Sits solemn now the book of kings
Its pages open for the precious quill
Loops and frills of ritual words
Arab emirs, king of Saudi oil
Queen of England, George Bush I and II
European monarchs small and tame
Taste plain without the salt and spice
A hollow game
Like old plays on a modern stage
Actors not the same so naked close
Pages blank, await the hand
I come quiet with my thief look
Whip out a pen, who’d ever see?
Would this book snap shut, a trap
And know my letters lesser
See sceptres not in hearts but grasping fists
Crowns only actors’ props
Not trueness of the ruler’s craft
My fingers snared, would alarm bells
Scream imposter ink?
But no, I didn’t really drink
Those cheeky dreams and foolish ale
Just turned the pages and read
The catalogue of famous names
Some now ousted, others dead

The world inside (2013)

You connoisseurs of vintage brew
Fine wines and brands, skim fat off the lands
Melt the ice and fell the trees
For me, myself and I
You sip the luxuries of life
Build fences for the future
For when the abject hordes blow in
As storms and waves and sudden rains
Stern southern cliffs I’ve seen in dreams
And northern edges, desert lands
Great cities full of green and charming streets
Unfurled so heady strong
No computer touch-up
Beats my night-time scenes
You connoisseurs of dividends and rising shares
You drink the fields and seas
Know but the bull and bear
The market type, the half you prefer
It was a joke when we were kids
Give me 3 cakes please for me, myself and I
As if we had 3 mouths
But better to have one heart
With the entire world inside

Take heart (2013)

Take heart
The sun slips by, another day
Another candle snuffed
Or fool gone on his way
Sorrowed words the poet spoke
Still sounding now
But take heart
A flame however small
Can steal the deepest dark
Never just the casing or the light
They only turn the streetlights off at dawn
But not the things inside

Heads down (2013)

Red on black is autumn leaves on asphalt
Once I had my eyes down to the gutters
Looked for coins
Found spots of sun-strewn gold
Once I tried to fly and learned to wear the wind
And when I cried the sky cried too
Clothed cares in gentle fog
Today they still go heads down
Eyes stuck to gadget screens
I once knew puddles filled with jewels
Jumped amidst their colours, tried to miss the worms
the rain brought out, pale pink on black

Fears (2013)

September leaves, rainbow’s brief burst
Raindrop breaks apart
Flower petals fade
Desert sands and crumbling cliffs
Season chasing season
Green soon grey and time flows by
Sun gone down and moon turned thin
It’s not these things I fear
But having nowhere left to fall and sink and die
No soil and no sky

History when I was small (2013)

Siege of Paris, people ate the city rats
Battle of the Somme, so many dead in a day
Sarajevo, guy shot a duke
And half the world went mad with war
I used to wonder at those things
Auschwitz, chimneys pumping human ash
Atom bomb, the blinding flash
And every August 6, my thoughts on Hiroshima
My thoughts on fire bombing, Dresden, Tokyo
Rape of Nanjing, ordinary rape
Agent Orange, killing fields
Things I little understood once,
Just heard the names, Pol Pot, Mao
Where was the ‘culture’ in the revolution?
Shahs and ayatollahs, Iran and Iraq
I chose the former for its sweeter sound
Just a kid then
Knew Thatcher needed the Falklands
And Russia and America made bombs
Huge piles of them, just in case

Battles (2013)

[I wrote this one just after terrorists attacked a shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya.]

Battle of the so and so
It was always some river, field or town
You can’t really say battle of the shopping mall
The bus, the underground
Battle of the towers coming down
People bombed in random lots
In clubs, schools, hotels, streets
Battle of the TV screens and hi-tech things
You still get ogres sprinkled in
Eat enemy hearts, like in the ancient tales
But even so, the battles not the same
They said if we did go nuclear mad
We’d fight our next war not with bombs
But sticks and stones
It turned out not quite so
We do it now with terrorists and drones

Curios (2013)

Things I keep inside, arranged
Like my curios on their stands
Good copies, tasteful fakes
Not in their small value their worth
But in the way they shine when sun shafts strike
Stamped with emperors’ marks, High Qing
Really Hu Jintao or Deng Xiaoping
Modern remakes of things past
Still I set them out and cast my loving eye
Inside I know those emperors’ words and deeds
Just curios amidst the days
The sounds they spoke, that Manchu tongue
Now consigned to archive files
No flesh-filled thing or skill of use
Though not for that I seek them
Light strikes me too and unpicks time
I trace forgotten letters in my imitation hand
My heart grows broad with people and their land

Ducks (2013)

Ducks by the pond in the park
Brass band played a march in the rain
Beyond the roofs rose cranes
Not the kind that fly
These had long necks, steel stems
Grabbed at the sodden sky
With their grey metal beaks
In this great city few surprises
Pylons, cables, chips, machines
Currents, signals, sleek devices
Common things of life, don’t make one stop
In a moment’s wonder, sudden halt
But ducks on one foot, heads tucked in sleep
How well made in the rain and cold
How well-crafted and perfectly planned
In one-legged row they stand
Chinese emperor wrote of clocks and chimes
Like a miracle of human hands
Poured from heaven’s inspiration
And I three hundred years on
Make ducks my contemplation

[The emperor I refer to in the poem above was Emperor Yongzheng (ruled 1723-1735) of the Manchu Qing dynasty. Jesuit missionaries looking for a way into royal favour in Beijing began bringing ‘exotic’ chiming clocks to the Chinese court in the early seventeenth century. Later, the Manchu emperors employed a whole staff of multi-talented Jesuits for various purposes, including to look after the clocks. Below is my translation of a poem Yongzheng wrote about a chiming clock.]

The Chiming Clock
Yongzheng

Our grace and power stretch to hearts in all the distant lands
To us they come from far-off countries, vie with rare and precious gifts
This clock the work of truly skilful hands
Its mechanism mirroring the heavens’ vault above
You hear its chime and know the hour, time of day
A lotus flower hanging in the sky, this clock a fantasy the same
That could only from an old monk’s mind have come

Rebuttal (2013)

[For Simon. Even on the school debating team I was always the middle one]

Now you get the cookbook look
That urge to fill the pot
Make life a measuring cup
Talk of seasoning and flavours
Put meat into the days and spice them hot
To burn, to make it run, the snot
The bloodied things and tears
You’d rather your steak rare
More flesh-like, teeth-ripped real
Chew this world with all its gristle and its grit
Greasy, lines the stomach thick
And then we can drink
The sharper stuff of short-lived flame
Isn’t that what poets always did?
How else could they stitch their hearts
In such strange pattern, make them rags,
Robes, mystics’ shrouds or banners raised
Not with teacup in hand they stirred their works
It had to be the world in a bottle
And sense of growing wide
Feasting fat on flirts and friends
On love and rage
The Bible’s Paul, he said it too
Not hot nor cold, I spew thee forth
I read it years ago and knew
My salt hole small
My eyes content with scraps of sky
My cloth of plain stuff, simple fare
I cooked and ate the same dish
Satisfied
I’d dress up now and then
To go on sudden binge
And wake regretful, false
Knew others could vomit it back out
Like Romans, clear themselves for more
You never saw me hide and sip my tea
Never guessed my lukewarm shore

The sky grows old (2013)

If the sky truly felt for us it would grow old too
Such words I read, and thought
It does grow old, each day
The hours tick its youth away
Late autumn fades its light
Dressed drab in old lady greys and browns
Bent low, pressed and tired
Winter-wrinkled, puckered up in old man’s frown
Makes you wonder where he went, the fretful boy with rushing eyes
The summer girl with arms flung wide to hug the world
Look up and see the cocky ones pick fights
The chance crowds cluster around
Like riot police and demonstrators
The kind who mask their faces, hurl stones
We all know youth has its storms
And didn’t the sky have them too?
Whip us with the wind, pelt and lash
Be a hooligan, a punk, a vandal
Spray can of snow or rain, and cheeky grin between the clouds
Dawn’s soft and pinkish kiss
Peach flush on city walls
Young mother’s quiet gaze
She throws across her child’s sleepy face
And steady night of map lines, moon
To guide, to cast a blanket broad
Silver streams of lighthouse light
Like teachers, fathers, calmer now with duties and years
Sky grown sedate, less flashy in its spread
Just like us it seems
Of the same moods and seasons
And we like its dawns and dusks

Finding a Mosque (2013)

[Moscow has perhaps as many as 15 million people, more and more of them Muslims, but only four mosques.]

Two slender lines, lit, looked like minarets
But this isn’t Moscowstan
Just the heating plant towers
Send out plumes of steam not calls to prayer
If the crescent hangs above the roofs
It’s only the moon and soon fills out
To mirror golden domes of churches now rebuilt
And it wasn’t Muslim hordes that tore them down
But local hands, Christian before they were red
How keen they are to be white now
You see,
The migrants squat, not sit, and spit
in the street and even kneel
Block the roads with bodies bent
Rows of sudden human spread
Make all Moscow their prayer mat
But why not?
Take sky as the arching vault
The walls wherever one finds them
A call to prayer in traffic sound and siren wails
See minarets in the heating plant’s winter candles

Tall Poppies (2013)

Tall poppies, how to guess what fate will cut them down
Would I be the opium kind, my bright head
Raised on Afghan slopes to see the sun
A shining coin for my cultivator’s humble hand
My fruits a numbing thief and soothing chain
My travelling roads the trade routes woven
Thick across this little world, my essence plain
No modern pill or product packed in lying hype
I’m fire on my mountainside, I’m livelihood and gain
Tall poppy not afraid to chase the sky
I’d rather be the solemn symbol sort
My red the commemorative stain on grey lapels
My petals concentrated drops of blood and pain
I’d rather be the prayers and dawn parades
My scarlet splash the warning song
The tolling bell to snatch and slap
Your senses in my paper poppy sea
And paint you in my flower form
Same blood that flows through us, every one
Same Afghan mountains, Flanders fields, same streets
Our brittle stems, our veins of common life
Our boats of common journey, common yoke
Our days and dreams, our wars and hopes
And of the planters and reapers I would tell you
Through endless harvests, endless winters, endless springs

Bottled World (2013)

Bottled peppers, pickles, plums, old ladies stand
In small flock at the market gate
Their bottled things arrayed, their pastes and jams
Fruit that hung all summer fat then autumn picked
Mushed and melted, now fills random jars
And on collectors’ shelves in coloured glassy rows
The world shrunk down to bulbs of fancy drink
A gulp or two of bitter, sweet or dry
Forms and labels richer in their tales told
The container not the content draws the eye
People stream in escalator lines
Concrete-bottled, metro sausage strings
Cattle crowd of elbows, faces blank
Not the peacock-pretty multi-coloured things
Not in winter grey and twilight coats wrapped thick
Bottled pickle once a pepper crisp and bright
As golden sun, and the liquor once was grape
Before they locked it in the glass and corked it tight
And the human flow, it runs from light to light
A smile tossed, a boy waits with a rose
Beneath the city-packaged layers, sudden sense
of closeness, them my sea and I their drop

Morning Mass in Moscow (2013)

Who lit the candles of this morning mass
Set the streetlights out in rows
And made the icons shine in haloed neon glow?
And where’s the priest? You only see
His cassock made of night
The moon his silver censer sliding bright
Across the vault, it’s edges smudged
As windows often are, layered with life’s grime
Coloured with the clouds and streaks of time
And what’s this choir of crows, these cackle calls
Could such ragged, raucous voices really speak a prayer
Or are hymns all from the heart and ever clear?
No sinners, penitents to spill confessions forth
The rubbish truck comes rattling on its morning round
Emptied bins, left the small things strewn on the ground
No need to kneel down and ask for daily bread
With corner shops now open round the clock
You know they’ve always got it there in stock
Now it’s others with bent heads and humble pose
Come out at dawn to sweep and not to pray
Snuff out the autumn candles and pack the gold away
The fallen leaves, winter snow, or summer grass too long
They work the morning mass, their brooms and spades its song
Find minarets in towers, in rain-laced puddles see the curls
of Arabic letters, trace the stars to skies of home
Though few stars we find here in this orange city dome
And does the city even care what name or faith of those
Who wake from night and lift their heads and eyes
to haloes in the office blocks and altars in the skies

Jaipur (2013)

Where was the real Jaipur?
These buildings not ornate and stark they stand
In sinking light, chill and spare
Boys’ cries fill the air, upon the roofs, fly kites
Dark diamonds in a deepening sky
Gemstone men busy with their talk and tea
Of milky, sugared kind, silver streams and gold
Chink of duping words, tongues glib and spiced
Zip through a maze of sudden corners, eyes
Dodge and swerve, never on a motorbike before
“Where are the elephants?” the guy asks a mate, phone to his ear
I didn’t care, saw alleyways instead
Drank tea in a shed beside the dusty road
And that was more the real Jaipur
Elephants at work, not back till night
Pigeons scatter to the eaves, old arches and arcades
Men fill the beggars’ bowls, “Do you want a taste”?
They stop my passing face, my Hindi just a shaky blade
To scratch away a layer here and there
Wind palace empty from behind, window holes in rows
Spy shifting life below, peek down on yards
Once a mansion, now they hang the washing out on strings
Lived-in lace, the faded, reddened hues
Blend with the sunset’s bleeding lines
This city pegged up too, suspended in the dust and noise

Varanasi (2013)

Out on the murky water the boat boy talked of school
An oldest child, not his lot to know the classroom cool
And learn the bookish way with teacher’s voice and tests
He pays his siblings through and his own hands know the press
Of oars not pages, he rows past timeless scenes
Below the princes’ dwellings forged of fantasies and dreams
Of men with dancing minds and grand or joyful eye
Those princes gone, the Ganges took their hopes and tears
Continues heedless, rushing onward through the years
Winter sun upon the sitters, steps and jersey-wearing goats
Casts pearls across the river and tickles humble boats
Upon the bank the fires burn, the people come and go
Add wood to pyres, tend the glow
The drifting smoke, sun, little lapping waves
People contemplate the changing light, sit and watch their future graves
And all that endless murky water flowing by
Some are thin and still, come from near and far to die
Become the ash and follow the river on downstream
The cleared sky above us and the trees smudged dusty green

Benares (2013)

Benares, the oldest city in the world they said
You sense it where the streets turn narrow
Bent and dim, sleeping cows and bustling thread
Of small shops, some sell modern things
And some the past, the craftsmen sit in age-old pose
Not streets these squeezed-in lanes
The morning dirt and dung comes running from the hose
A daily clean, and by the Ganges people do the same
Old man with toothbrush in his hand
Laughing tourists dip a toe in as a game
Boatmen wait to make their human catch
Pilgrims cluster as evening ritual lights the fire high
The crowds come close and guards frisk first for bombs
Young men wear India’s centuries in their eyes
The flame they raise this world gone on and on
Its oldest city full of sounds and glow
From funeral pyres down along the water’s edge
Embers, ashes, while beyond the city lives and flows
With frying smells and steam and busy hands
The hawkers, rickshaws, goods out on display
Not thinking of the Ganges’ countless sands

Humility (2013)

[For Natasha]

So many words upon my tongue, I sent them forth
Like lighthouse beams for friends and passing craft
My streams as if the drink to quench their thirst
Salt sea surrounds and I the drop to fill their glass
Made of all the ages, sun and moon and stars
Like fat Buddhas in the temples, smiling wide
My mouth the broadest rivers running fast
See my eyes so big, so blue, the oceans held inside
Until the fog sweeps in and casts a dampening cloak
And science says the moon is just a rock all cold and grey
Lighthouse bulbs go out, replacement candles never shine so far
To pierce the dark and warn of dangers on the way
I’m not the iron rod you’d hold and not the rescue line
Of what use my waxy melting things, my words
Not waves but froth and foam I toss upon your shores
My stores of wisdom read like advertising blurbs
But did I think to be a cliff or grand cathedral tower
Up high to toll my bells for one and all
Like when I was a kid and wondered could I be the torch
The flame, the teacher, waking others to my call
And now I stand with tears not flames
Not nations, crowds, but just a single friend to snatch
In fragile arms, with my ocean but a muddy puddle
And my lighthouse just a flimsy failing match

Ouarzazate (2013)

[Ouarzazate is a Moroccan town on the arid edges of where the land runs on into the Sahara]

This city wall could teach painters
Play of contrasts, dark or bright
Simple archway oval, line of blinding light
The lanes pulled close and tight
To turn the houses dim and throw them deep
In hush of midday murmurs, drifting sleep
The sunlit square where women pluck the chickens bare
They dress in sky with threads of forest green
A tender sheen these scoured lands have never known
Atop the towers storks build towers of their own
Pale oranges and pinks brush buildings soft
With petals, spring and dawn in tender kiss
The lips of light that spot and stroke the twists
The turns of alleys, upper windows’ spying eyes
Belong to languid girls who lie
In lazy stretch and watch a tiny world go by
Beyond, the sands creep near, the searing sea
Of fierce desert colours, harsh
And diamond hard, the dunes too endless
Sky too vast, an old man cuts it into strips
And sells the fabric bolts in the backroom of his shop

Shenyang (Ode to Mukden)

[Mukden was the name the Manchus gave their capital before they crossed the Great Wall in 1644 and established the Qing dynasty in China. The 18th century Qing Emperor Qianlong wrote a poem called ‘Ode to Mukden’, which the Jesuits translated and sent home to curious readers in Europe.]

Still Mukden when the emperor set it in a poem
The Jesuits took it west across the seas
An ode for distant kings and scholars to peruse
A city Voltaire held and sung its ruler’s praise
Same Mukden caught in foreign cameras’ flash
From days of conflict, carving countries, staking claims
Exotic eyes that grabbed the city low, the spirit poles
Of shamans, Manchus’ temples, took and spread the scenes
Through books, but out the window hardened snow
It’s Shenyang now and office lights rise high around
While Chairman Mao stands stubborn on the square below
In ice and biting wind, what ode to sing
To steel-concrete lines and streets turned huge
Inhuman in their sweep, dimensions grand
But grey and grim, and who would have a hymn within
To cranes and grit, construction sites
To smog-filled skies and pipes and belching smoke
The houses dark, the old ones Japanese
In 1930s sternness stand in cold-pinched rows
Below the new blocks, glassy sameness grown tall
They kept a piece of city heart aside
Its walls and gates the money-making bit, the single sight
Where palaces shine red and gold in frozen sun
Their voices long since gone and poems died

Snow in Shanghai (2013)

Snow in Shanghai
Rare
A girl done up in red
Her shoulders bare
She stood, the Bund beyond
And Pudong snatching at the stars
She posed with snow and night
Wrapped in her wedding dress
Bright
Towers blink and flash
Spit and spray their glow
The Bund alive at one end
People flow
Photo guys with tinny songs
Hopping to keep warm
Farther in the icy wind
The scene forlorn
Construction sites
Fenced-off silence thick
And through the alleys scattered lights
Some in lonely shine
Amidst the shells and ruins
Shadows slide
Before the lanes press close
A busy cloak
They throw around the crowds
With cooking smells and hawkers’ shouts
The market stalls and steam
The chopping knives at work
In places lit and others dim
A dog
They peel off its skin
To sell the meat
On Nanjing Road the fancy stores
Replete
Fed fat with people too
Down side streets with their naked trees
The city’s past blows through

Orchha (2013)

[Orchha is a small town in India’s Madhya Pradesh State]

In fog as dense as this
All figures wear its shrouds
Who could tell a tin shack from a temple
With the tops cut off, the squatting clouds
Suck centuries away and hide the ancient face
Make the meaning come alive
Orchha – the ‘hidden place’
In winter veil and numbing cold
Its seeping damp and darkened lines
That scorn the promised colours, glowing gold
The diamond river, peaks and points
Of sculpted stone
At night all cats are grey
In Orchha too the charcoal tone
If I’m as blanket-bundled-up as they
Alone to taste the night and hear the owls
Wander silent back lanes
In their blankets others pass, and quiet cows
Orchha – the hidden place
Its ringing name
Speaks more than shrouded temples
Whispers truth of all of us the same
Beneath my wrapping I am me
And yet in dimness of this foggy night
There’s nothing different they can see
Beyond the fog the moon shines pure
Same one we’ve all glimpsed full and round
It’s never really shining or obscure
It’s only we who think it lost or found
And we who think the fog has pushed us down
To just the humbler lights
Of little shops and street stalls
Without the ancient temple heights
Orchha stays hidden if you search for sun and cleared skies
And yet it isn’t in the fog at all
But spread before my eyes

Hangzhou’s Other Season (2013)

[A Chinese saying goes: “The skies have paradise, and earth has Suzhou and Hangzhou]

A paradise of slapping wind and snow
That was Hangzhou, not the fabled scene
Of heaven’s double down on earth below
Whose paradise would be a town pressed low in ceaseless rain?
Yet that was Suzhou, China’s other famous jewel
Its hallowed gardens damp and all the same
In sorry look and ragged light
That melts the stones and stories, stills the streams
So one could wonder how they ever burned so bright
In all the poets’ works and poured from artists’ brush
Or is it just that paradise has winter too
The Bible’s Eden once so fertile green
Now arid desert winds blow through
And can one really call the season right or wrong?
Hold sands and winter back and keep towns set
As legend made them in its heaven-seeking song?
I’m lonely midst cement and thronging crowds
In city pinch of vain and heedless rush
Tempting dreams of mountain peaks and clouds
But what good the monk who only walks the miles
Towards an ever distant destination sign
And can’t stay true in metro trains and supermarket aisles
As if our hearts were not within but somewhere far away
And paradise had but a single season
Not a never-stopping flow and changing day
Yet Hangzhou’s lake in winter’s clammy hands
It shone with hushed and white-laced charm
And in Suzhou’s muddied gardens silver hung in countless strands

Mandela (December 7, 2013)

[We studied South Africa, still under the apartheid regime then, when I was in school, and I became interested in Nelson Mandela and his complicated country. This poem I wrote after hearing of his death.]

As if a flower, glowing fruit amidst the twigs
The birch tree bare on this December day
It was just an orange streetlight peering from behind
Dissolving with the winter grey
Decide the sky’s now firm enough to flick the switch
And gone the fruit, the flower, the warming flame
Mandela, yesterday they spoke the news
Recall that once his glow was just a match
And many tried to strike its tiny form
Coat its head with combat, lock its latch
With thoughts one saw in others’ bombing hands
That trailed blood and fierce fight across the years
From Marxist talk and training camps
Kalashnikovs, the dead and tears
First well-intentioned sowers, brave and bold
In hostile soil toss their liberating seeds
Though often it’s to later see the crops
Grow blighted, overrun by poisonous weeds
And who’s to guess how people wear their trials
When fed a stingy ration, prison pain
And if they’ll grow wider than those narrow cells
Keep hearts alive and even know the gain
That comes to separate the noble from the chaff
And lights small beacons for each age
As storms are tempered, wisdom flows
In that alchemy of greatness, longed-for sage
We ask a lot, seek heroes perfect pure
Forget the lands that bore them, fields’ flaws
Forget that winter rocks and sways the light
And fog comes down and even heroes trip and fall
Perhaps this only makes it dearer still
That only human, yes, and yet do shine and learn
And even from the harshest, poorest soil
Can come good seeds and lamps that burn
For all and promise calmer roads
I know the Moscow tree, its orange bloom
Illusion but could yet become the real thing
Even if the spring is not due soon
But come it does, for never do the seasons stop
We’ll always find a boat to cross the seas
Bring light from prison islands back to land
And hang it from the naked winter trees

Fatehpur Sikri (2013)

[Fatehpur Sikri is an old palace complex not far from Agra in India. Emperor Akhbar had it built and moved his court there. It was clearly a grand place in its day, but the water supply proved bad and the site was soon abandoned.]

My eyes have extra lens of facts and books
Paint ruined palaces anew in royal looks
So easy in the hide and seek of fog and sun
To glimpse the past and pick the solid stone undone
And through an archway see a whole procession come
Great Moghul Emperor Akhbar with his suite
It was just a local shepherd with his sheep
I thought of all the people lived and gone
Their empty palaces no longer chiming song
To ruler’s dreams and craftsmen’s skillful hands
Another crumbling pile in these ruin-studded lands
By India’s long measure hardly old at all
When centuries are nothing and some sites can recall
Such ancientness as only legends speak
While Akhbar’s time was more like just last week
I know my own land with its face still caught in teenage flush
Its jewels still fires within and stone the heated stuff
Of molten streams and moody shifting splits
All constant change and sudden youthful fits
No ruins to weigh it down with heavy time
In melancholy coals of former great names’ shine
And yet the shepherd had no sorrow in his gaze
Just led his sheep along the path and took them off to graze
And what to him that Akhbar built these regal walls
When in the village down below the lanes in daily swell
The market square, the tiny shops and modest trade
Look little different now to back in Akhbar’s reign
The stones just blocks to pull apart and raise again
In other forms or set up stalls beneath the towers
Local kids to roam the gardens, pinch the flowers
Fog soon fled and sun spread through the sky
And from the village let me look with lensless eye
Make past and future suddenly the same
Yesterday, tomorrow, just a single name
In Hindi it is so, this tongue that’s cut to suit
The ruins, towers, forts and moats
The craftsmen, begging kids and roaming goats
Not old or young but just life’s endless stream
Of circling seasons and the ebb and flow of dreams

The Millions (2013)

[This poem took its inspiration from a sonnet by Charles Hamilton Sorley, When you See Millions… The sonnet was in a collection of writing about World War One.]

Of war I read
The poems, the pain, the countless dead
And when you see the millions…
The millions thrown together in common grave
Of what were battle lines
And now are places paved
With bones and blood and interwoven human flesh
Their lives they gave, it makes me wonder why
All men they flocked together, came to fight and die
Though I wonder even more at how we live
Our dreams, our aims, the things we choose to give
And when you see the millions…
The millions thrown together in common streets
Not soldiers now, as citizens they meet
But in each other sense the foe or spy
Protect the private castles, avert the eyes
From foreign gaze or so as not to see
The other kind of me, one old or poor or not all there
Or just a neighbour’s sad or jealous stare
Of their own accord our hearts and hands
Lay borders, demarcate the lands
And build the trenches, place the guns
The lines of city fences, few the crossing points
Fewer still the truces called, the white flag raised
For emergencies perhaps, for holidays
When we stop being islands, become the sea
Unstitch the private space and melt into the ‘we’
But otherwise, the lonely shadows flitting by
For one or two a tear we could cry
Extend an outstretched hand and warming word
Not snatched away unheard in city rush
That sometimes brings to mind the people crush
Like in the soldiers’ tales, piles of corpses in the way
Just trampled underfoot in war’s indifferent haste
That dulls the finer feelings, steals the taste
Of fellow human beings and fate we share
These streets and skies and yellowed, dirtied air
Amidst the millions lose our individual face
Become the masses, fashion our new place
As atolls, reefs, and endless rocks
No shore we leave for building docks
No room in concrete towers grown tall
The weaving all machine-done now
And we, we raise the walls.

Abdulaziz (2013)

[Abdulaziz (1830-1876) was an Ottoman sultan. He was a keen reformer and moderniser and the first sultan to visit Western Europe. He was deposed in 1876 and killed himself soon after, though it was more likely that he was murdered. While travelling in Turkey, I bought an old medal commemorating the sultan’s visit to London. The medal was in a tiny bric-a-brac shop in the middle of the dusty, hot Anatolian plains, a long way from Istanbul’s palace parks and sea views. It was a chance encounter that sparked another of my bonds with the past.]

I can confess the dreams and whispered stir
Of many worldly things, though I knew they never were
Quite what they seem, but still
Midst turquoise tiles and weave of stone cut fine
The slanting light and sudden shaded cool
I’d see myself recline, not idle in the least
But deep in governing affairs beyond
Through all the pageantry and song stay diligent at heart
So hard to know of course the real taste, the test
The summit view when not so summer-blessed
At such an altitude the air too bitter cold
Rich finery for skin the same as any other skin
It fits with sometimes choking hold
I found him in a basement shop
A medal sultan bronze and properly severe
In metal memory engraved, a travel souvenir
Brief stop, this dusty village not a name I even knew
Nor this ruler heavy in my palm
He went to London long ago and saw the charms
Of novelties and distant lands, the welcome feasts
And promises of brotherhood and trade
But in the darkened hour no friends came to his aid
The fallen fall and if not killed, stashed out of sight
No turquoise-tiled walls to soothe the hurting gaze
No palace light inlaid with gems and gold
Just soured dregs of tumbled mocking days
They said in creeping madness took his life
Or clasped by sadness, who can say
With plots and murders staple stuff, I took his face away
Smooth against my skin the metal lines
I stare at times and know the sultan dreams like clouds
Just short-lived wisps or ripples in the sky
A balance weight upon my hand for thoughts too proud
Reminder that the tiles crack and water keeps on flowing by

Pan Gu Anew (2014)

[A man whose job it was to watch over a former Buddhist temple hall in Beijing’s Beihai Park was musing on the way science hadn’t come close to what ancient sages once achieved, sending their minds and hearts out roaming the universe while never leaving their places. He said he’d read somewhere that if we stretched out our blood vessels they’d reach around the whole world. As for Pan Gu, he was the hero of Chinese legend, who forced the earth and sky apart and let his body’s various parts become the things of our world – the mountains, rivers, forests and so on, and us too. It got me thinking of a modern Pan Gu and what he might be.]

These flowing roads, blood vessels of mine
If you stretched them in long string
Would wrap the globe just like the measuring lines
of maps, they’d be a ring
around this world, more elastic than we think
If you took my every vein and made of them a rope
The kind to throw to flailing hands
And knot it firm with ferried blood and cells of hope
Cast across the seas to farthest lands
True, my bones would never be those steel towers
that pose and fight for every inch more height
Planned clumps of gaudy metal night-lit flowers
Not in me such soaring stature tossing high the sights
But as a bridge I could lay myself down, or be the planes
that link the points, my long-haul heart
The spanning girders, fuel for flight, the rushing trains
that make us never really strangers, never far apart

Beijing (2014)

Stern the emperor’s pose and face
A mirror of the place beyond, forbidden heart
With walls to keep the royal life apart and lines
Of ritual roads and temples a restraining mesh
Gangrene in the feudal flesh, they cut it out
Gouge gashes through the past and make it wide
For bitter wind to whip and lash, pour concrete
To divide the things once narrow, turn them broad
Or tear them down and build them up anew
As soulless copies or simply stitch the city through
With long, long thread of skyward form and then repeat
In all those straightened, widened streets the same design
And call it modern, progress, all that feudal feeling gone
Although this cold-edged city’s song sounds no less stern
And modern emperors still sit tight behind their walls
With guards and gates and cling fast to their turn
At wearing privilege and power, sup and lick their lips
But this passing mask can never yet disguise
The city’s real eyes, the wrinkled net of lanes laid thick
In twists and turns of smile lines all creased
With time and life, a skin that’s chapped and worn
And warm, in huddled winter grabs the frozen sun
The spilling moments strung in constant garland
As the festive red of New Year words that make a frame
For doorways, red of more than Mao or shopping malls
And more than palace walls or prestige games

Hong Kong in July (2014)

In July the soaring city doesn’t have much left
Not with rain so thick and fast and clouds so fat
To make the island flat, eat its hills and leave the crumbs
In mottled flecks of forest green and metal grey
Sea swept restless rocks the boats, the humid heat stays close
Flamingos blotching pink the park, the market colours too make dabs
Between the concrete canyons, drape a natural kind of bright
Before the evening brings the lights in famous flickering display
The international men in suits soon melt away and down below
It’s only Cantonese, and shops that sell the old stuff
Medicines and fish and dried things, pearls and jade
Auspicious names and every kind of hope and wish
And teas to clean the liver and benefit the spleen
Bitter herbs that wouldn’t make an export trade
People sit in cafes, shop in air conditioned streams
While the maids and nannies fill the business district streets
In weekend picnic with the footpaths as their grass
At night see how the lightning bolts compete
With neon stripes across the building walls
On other islands little fishing towns wait to speak the past
Pounded by the rain and sudden squalls of wind
The battered roofs, the lanes like running rivers
Corrugated iron din, the drops that come
In fitful starts and stops, July is soaked
And leaves an empty beach and bobbing boats
That seem so far from skyscrapers, stocks and shares
The commerce hub, the contrast world, the fragrant port

The Moon at Pushkar (2014)

[I expected Pushkar, a Hindu pilgrimage site in Rajasthan, to be bustling thick with crowds about their rituals and all the foreign tourists watching on. Pilgrim crowds and tourists there were, but the holy lake itself was near deserted and I had it and the evenings almost to myself.]

The moon at Pushkar seemed to speak
It said, the pilgrims, I know why they have come
The path they tread is worn smooth, they do not seek
But rather walk a well-lit road between the priests and prayers
They scatter flowers upon the lake and simple homage pay
As did their forebears through the years in patient stream
And the hippies, I know what brings them here
This little town strung through the dusty land perhaps their dream
Of not just café-sitting laid-back life
But quests and hopes that flicker in their eyes
To make a haven into heaven only takes an ‘e’
A tiny thing, and yet the hidden gem that makes us wise
Hidden here they think because this is the ‘East’
Steeped in difference, packaged in the travel guides
And so they see in me, my rising orb between the hills
A somehow more exotic moon than that which lights
Their common streets and shelter of their everyday
Though I am everywhere the same and neither east nor west I know
But like the birds down on the ghats, those heedless geese
I come and go, as they, uncaring of the holy site in which they roam
Stain steps and shroud the sacred in such a mundane fleece
The pale Pushkar moon, it asked
And you, why do you journey to this place?
The geese are flown and I alone in sock-clad feet
Amidst the evening bells and chants that wove an unseen silver lace
A trembling circling sound I went to greet
And to the moon I did not speak
For there are moments when the tongue is better mute
And when a solitary figure one should try to make
Not so as to leave one’s fellows in this world behind
But to better see and understand the real shape
And sense of where we stand and where our journeys go
And be the moon, the pilgrim, searching hippy and the goose
Brought together in the pearl-embroidered glow

Nothing to Declare (2014)

[I was impressed by the skills of a sniffer dog at Auckland airport that got excited by a plastic bag in which I’d had an apple, bought in Moscow and eaten on the plane. That’s what set off this poem. The Chinese sage is a reference to Laozi. Legend has it that he went travelling west and the border guard, who didn’t want anyone sneaking anything out of the land, wouldn’t let him pass until he’d handed over whatever was in his possession. Laozi’s ‘possessions’ being inside him, he wrote them down and gave them to the guard, and that is how the book Dao de Jing came into being.]

Nothing to declare
At least, not plants and foods and dust
Not hides and shrivelled parts and living creatures thrust
into some hidden box or bag that maybe might escape
the customs people’s scrutinising stare
Though not the sniffing dogs with noses vigilant
for what was yesterday consumed
And now leaves only stale scent
Nothing to declare I say and think
What if they asked me like they asked the ancient Chinese sage
The guard there at the pass with just as vigilant a gaze
That got from him no smuggled precious things
But only words more precious still in what they held within
And I, I have no foreign soil upon my soles
But carry streets and cities caked deep into my cracks and holes
I have with me no seeds and spores
And yet inside am filled with sprouts and shoots
Of things I’ve found on other shores
No animals or parts thereof I bear
But have seen in other lands the objects of our fear
And not just parasites and pests and snakes
But also scars of war and all the manmade blight
The ignorance and stubbornness and short-term sight
And what it does unleashed across the globe
It slowly knits a coarse and chafing robe
that someday all of us will have to wear
No matter if it’s made of fibres banned
They haven’t yet a way to scan
For what comes drifting in like toxic haze
And cannot easily keep out
The consequences of our actions and our age
And set a quarantine that would be like slicing us in two
As if to keep the you from me and me from you
And separate our breath and air
But none of this is on the form
And thus I’ve nothing to declare

What I Paint (2014)

[I like to paint and take photos, but many people have asked me why I choose the ‘ugly’ or unimportant things, decrepit buildings or alleyways say, rather than things more polished or famous. I just got back from another holiday and showed my photos to a friend, who said, “Oh, more slums!” That’s what sparked this poem. The ruler mentioned in the poem is a reference to a 15th-century Chinese emperor.]

Why approach things from the back as if a servant or a thief
A voyeur come to peek at girls without their makeup on
And bodies in their nude relief
Their moles and blemishes they’d rather hide
With little tricks and clothes of cunning fit
And cities do the same, dress up in gloss and glass
While you undo the coats and pick the robes apart
Flit blithely past the well-maintained facades
Like kids throw off their Sunday best and rush to join
The little rascals down the road
You linger in the alleys and the yards
Go gathering the weeds and search the streets
For cracked and faded faces, tumbled homes
A scavenger of ugliness, a poet of the slums
And painter of the cold, decayed and poor
The shabby old remains, the bits of life gone worn or numb
No different to the ruler who had so full a plate
Of beauty, women and their charms so fine
His heart grew bored and from around his lands
Brought in a set of freaks and hags with whom to spend his time
Until his appetite grew firm once more
And eyes could look anew upon the beauty from before
But no, I’m not a hippopotamus to wallow in the swamp
And revel in the warts and oozing sores
The pus of industry or poverty, our clashes and our wars
It’s more like I’m a kid there at the older people’s side
And see them turtle-necked and toothless but yet full of words
To which I’m meant to listen with respect, a vessel wide
of ears and silent of its tongue
A constant grandchild, I let them make my breast
their archive and their camphor-smelling treasure chest
And with my brush put light in eyes grown old
For later knowledge store the scenes before they crumble or they fall
In the autumn harvest cycle to the scythe or wrecker’s ball
Amidst their wrinkles and their grey I steal the gold
Not the hag-collecting emperor trying to renovate his heart
But a chronicler and keeper, or perhaps a drifting ship
With the world upon my decks and precious cargo in my hold

Three Romes

[Rome we all know, but not everyone knows that Moscow called itself Rome too, the ‘Third Rome’, seat of what it saw as the true faith after the religious debates that split Europe’s Christians into Catholics and Orthodox. The ‘second Rome’ was Constantinople, but when it fell to the Turks, Moscow decided to assume the mantle. The three poems that follow are for these ‘three Romes’]

The First Rome (2014)

It’s the pomp and purple dreams
Makes them covet that name, Rome
Suckled by the wolf, the legends run so deep
I seldom saw a place that fit the image in my heart
No chance to make it home, I only had a day
For the patience proverb city, squashed in summer heat
Left St Peter’s wilting queue and walked
From ochre lanes and squares through latticework
Of sun and shade, the sights that splice
Each scene, each turn, and send the water sluggish
Cut a slice of green-tinged time through slopes
And sudden views of villas, real Roman ones
Caught cappuccino whiff, the breath of popes
Languid lazy life and power makes the spice
The colours market stalls along the Tiber’s banks
We had the Tiber too in Island Bay, an ordinary road
But here the Roman Way and set in just the frame
I pictured, product matched the blurb
An honest work for all the cunning and deceit
In sighs and stifled sounds that seep from stone
Or cling as moss and stain the streets
This Rome
A venerable sort, like the Queen in hat and pearls
And at the same time some old whore who used to put on airs
But now just has a sassy laugh and doesn’t hide
Her age marks, doesn’t care, in any case all know
Her magic and her kiss
The Chariots and gladiators gone
Motor scooters zip along, and Christians, lions get new names
An emperor royal-robed or harlot on the hills
Holy man’s abode with God’s fond eye above
A mother wolf, she’d curl around us all
And have us too drink in her milk
What flavour from her teats
A taste of life, the world in mix of bitter venom, nectar sweet

The Second Rome (2014)

What do I know of things divine?
At least God had an eye
For where to make the holy cities rise
On hilltops, jewelled in sea and sky
I’ll leave the split for others to debate
With tongues that skid and slip
Motes and beams the scaffolding around their sight
I’ll let them dream of former names
If I were Mehmet I’d have been the same
Sought the prize and laid siege to the walls
If God should want these hilltops, what to say of men
With hungry hearts and visions bold
This city not the second Rome
I know it only Istanbul
So like its Grand Bazaar and I the buyer
Wandering the covered lanes
To browse and pick and sample here and there
The cross or crescent, bells or call to prayer
All matter little, layered as they are
Every seller hawks his wares with praise
And I have no regrets for tales of Greece
For Europe’s splendid East and Roman heir
Not to unseen heavens lift my gaze
Enough to minarets atop the peaks
The Turkish tongue, it warms my ears too
The seagulls sang the same for every age

The Third Rome (2014)

Strange once to my mind that European tongues
Made men and women even of the tables and the chairs
And where I saw Rome as Caesar with his laurels
on his ears, virile sort you’d think could lead
an empire grand and all those armies, all those lands
Stared back at me no man at all, a name that tricked
She really was a girl, though not of Italy her face
Not so much of Caesar either save the regal stare
The swords his soldiers wore, their icy glint
was what she took and made her mantle
Coronation gown of winter trim
Diamonds not her crown but in her gaze
These haughty beauties in the Moscow streets
As princesses they pass
And overhead the sky is blue with cold
Unfolds its purity and ringing shine
A sparkling shawl across this city once a forest
Now a spread of gold, proclaims itself the third Rome
Speaks to the world, behold my charms, the age-old call
This third Rome really is a girl and cunning too
As if the winter sun was summer’s gentle ball
The plumes of steam a silken pillow
On which to lie my head, belched from the chimneys
But as if a bed with sheets of promises and pomp
Tsarist splendours, Stalin’s crushing scale, she clasps it all
Lives the podiums, parades and keeps the party hour long
And not all see the other side of midnight, hear the softer song
Of undressed moments in the side streets
Humble yards and drab beyond
Or catch a window glimpse of women when the princesses have gone
The laurels rotted winter leaves
And there never was a third Rome, only dreams
Only Moscow trying on the different styles, playing chic
Like the Russian girls today in Rome’s boutiques
Still drawn to the most expensive brands
Better to be Caesar than some grey and mundane king
Wear at least the legend sleek as if a perfume dabbed
Or reproduction ring upon the hand
And born the emperor, gone the ordinary man

The Fish (2014)

You know the things I recall
The Italians, we bought scoops of chips
They had Naples on the wall
“You cheeky kids”, they’d say
“We’ll fry you up”
They even showed us where we’d lie in wait
Amidst potato strips all pale and cold
We got no fish, just canned spaghetti on our plates
The classic Friday feast, it stayed a special treat
When from the paper hot and crunchy-battered
Tasted juicy sweet, we seldom got what Maui caught
More often his canoe
Is yours the North Island or the South, our little game
To take the deep-fried shape and measure it with home
Were the chips then oars with which to row away through dreams
The salty crumbs of archipelagos, the paper plain
A hot and bulging present in our arms, carried home back up the hill
Such things that I recall, my skinny island fish
I saw whole countries stretched out on a wall
In the Paris metro corridor, and every day I passed
A flattened, pasted world without my islands at the edge
For lack of room perhaps or they just didn’t see the need
For a side-dish to the globe
When up above were famous sights and names
The city where the legends strode
Once found their inspiration, slept and ate
Not ever Watties canned spaghetti on their plate
Or Friday chips, but strange to feel the wound
The fishhook of my little islands gone
The net they’d thrown upon me, lines cast long
Like the Italians’ hands that reached our cheeky tongues
They really tossed me in the oil and cooked me up
Battered me in memories that now left grease and stains
In Paris streets and seeped out from my veins.

The Cranes of Kaifeng (2014)

[Kaifeng was the capital of the Song Dynasty in China until 1127, when the Jurchen armies from Manchuria invaded and seized the city. ‘Auspicious cranes over the palace roofs at Kaifeng’ was a painting by the Song emperor of that time, Huizong. Huizong became emperor somewhat by accident and had the misfortune of taking over the country’s helm at a particularly difficult moment in history. He made a name for himself as an artist and calligrapher, but as is usual for toppled rulers in Chinese historical tradition, ended up regarded – somewhat unfairly perhaps – as an inept emperor. Huizong, his son and numerous family members were captured by the Jurchens and led off to distant Manchuria. He died after eight years of bleak exile up near the border with Russia.]

No auspicious birds I saw in Kaifeng’s skies
The gold-trimmed dawn, the circling cranes
The palace roofs, a dream the emperor had
And fixed it firm on paper spread before my eyes
My Kaifeng was a city rough and raw
With little left to show the touch
Of Emperor Huizong’s brush
That dream he saw, an omen heaven-sent
As with the bells, the songs and poems delicate
The stones that wondrous mountains made
This ruler drank the nectar, rode the clouds
Turned his graceful hand
And came the cranes forever frozen
In their happy number, wheeling pose
In harmony that tugged from me the tears
Saw Kaifeng as I’d found it, ordinary town
Past’s remnants scattered midst the clumps of grubby snow
And many times I thought since then
Of Emperor Huizong on the road to what he never dreamed he’d know
Eight tortured years in frigid northern wastes
A prisoner shamed, a man once emperor
Sipped the exile’s brew and found its taste
Too foul for dreams and poems withered in his heart
No ink to write them down, no brush with which to paint
And yet the emperor, he still speaks
The gilded dawn, auspicious cranes
As if to warn us of complacency and pride
Or is it me who’s made to glimpse my luck
Not a ruler bound by hidden chains
that stop the birds from flying free
And make them not the miracles they seem
But only hopeful paintings from the emperor’s brush
Just wishful thinking and the echoes of his dreams

[Here is my translation of a poem that Huizong wrote while being led off into exile.]

Pavilion on the Swallow Mountain
(Seeing an apricot tree in flower on the road north into exile)
Huizong (Zhao Ji)

As if cut of ice this silk hangs dense yet gently draped
Smooth dabbed in blushing powder’s pale hues
So splendid an attire, so flowing full in drifting scent
Outdoes even that sweet maiden in her palace in the sky
But in heartless wind and ruthless rain
Too easily this marvel wilts and fades
And such deep sorrow swells my heart
It’s all that I can do to ask this cheerless yard
How many moments more to sup this last of spring?
Exile’s dreary load of sadness I would send
With this pair of swallows passing by
Only would they understand our human tongue?
And in this endless land of boundless sky
In the countless mountains, rivers, passed along my road
How would I even know now where to find my palace of old?
No matter what measure of longing I give
Only my dreams still sometimes carry me home
Though to their hope I cannot cling, for even dreams desert me now
[Huizong wasn’t the only Chinese emperor to express such sorrowful thoughts and taste the bitterness of exile and defeat. Below is my translation of a poem by Li Yu, the last ruler of the Southern Tang, who was captured and eventually killed by the founder of the Song dynasty (Huizong’s dynasty). In one of the ironies of fate, Huizong left remarks in which he muses on Li Yu’s ineptness and failings as a ruler and the shame of such a fate. Little did he guess then the turn his own life would take.]

Waves sift through the sands
Li Yu

Beyond the curtain, soft sound of rain
Quiet murmur of spring on the wane
My fine-spun quilt too thin
For this early hour’s chill, dawn creeping in
In dreams my exile erased
Brief moment of sweetened taste 
Don’t stand there at the railing all alone
Before the mountains, rivers, endless stretch beyond
So easy once to bid it all farewell
So hard when only memories now swell
And as water flows on by and flowers die
Spring too leaves our midst, deserts the sky

My Piece of Blue Glass (2014)

I go back to the days when
My eyes were close to what was scattered on the sand
Just bottles broken up, ground smooth
And I would search
The common brown and green for that tiny piece of blue
A crumb of glass to hold up to the world and peer through
The waves my tribute bearers, brought me gifts
Of maharajahs’ gems and Chinese emperors’ precious plates
A piece of sapphire sky dug up in Island Bay
A pine and mountain fragment in the seaweed strands
Imagination did the rest and made me rich
This day they talk of Ukraine’s toppled leader fled
The people gone to gawp at all he left behind
Too much to carry from his palaces too grand
He ate the azure sky off Ukraine’s flag
In stumbling fit of greed he couldn’t stop
In Moscow too they like their bit of blue
Atop the fat cats’ cars so big and sleek
A flashing light to clear the street
And make one feel like a prince
With peasants drawn to each side
Though no real power such illusions give
But only fear that the tide will come to snatch
The things it gave and toss them up on other shores
Pour sunset streaks as blood across the skies
And me, I lost my beach and treasure sea
But in the metro sands of stations
Are small places where I know
the light and ornament still speak the same
With sudden glow that holds my gaze
If some need private jets and some take drugs
to leave themselves behind or journey round the world
I am the wealthiest and happiest of all
With just my roaming mind and piece of blue

[This next poem takes its inspiration from a poetic exchange between two brothers in 11th-century China. The two, Su Shi (also known as Su Dong Po) and Su Zhe, served as officials, had their share of career ups and downs, and were prominent literary and political figures of their time. Su Shi in particular made a lasting name for himself as a poet and essayist. Below, I first give my translation of the two poems that set my own thoughts running.]

Su Zhe
Letter to my brother, remembering Man Pond

Together we rode, at Zheng Plain parted ways
Long journey ahead, we feared mud and snowy days
On horseback I sought the old paths to take me home
Crossed the western mountains, travelled on alone
I was a county official once, do the people still recall?
Remember, in a monk’s room one night, we wrote upon the wall
This long and lonely road, it stretches joyless now and bleak
My piebald horse neighs the only feelings it can speak

Su Shi (Su Dong Po)
Reply to my brother’s letter, recalling Man Pond

What is a man’s life, you want to know?
It’s like when the goose sets foot on muddied snow
And without a thought takes to the skies again
Only random trail of claw marks leaves a stain
The old monk dead now, but a new pagoda rises tall
Past inscriptions lost in ruins of a crumbled wall
All these years gone, do you still recall the rugged way we came?
Wearied by the road so long, the old donkey braying, lame
Memory of things (2014)

Life is not so much like geese upon the snow or seagulls on the sand
Those are the constants in this world
Even in our cities grown huge
In a sparrow’s inch of dirt still glimpse the claw marks
True, the birds, they never land for long
But they never lose their circling urge
Like seasons pass, but only so as to return
Our things are better measure of what is lost or brief
Recall, with handkerchiefs they used to bid farewell
Stuffed in small kids’ pockets, coloured squares
They were a boring gift old ladies sent
I got my share when I was young, though who would send them now
And who would contemplate their loss or even care?
We still write on walls, often nothing more than “so and so was here”
Or other vulgar stains that say essentially the same
Claw marks in the snow will come again
But crumbling stone and faded letters fall
And I recall when quills and ink were what was ancient in my mind
Now my fingers even pen and paper scarcely know
The mailbox was once a line across the miles to friends
But now their words I do not hold
They’re all in virtual storage, piles of ourselves
We paste and share and feel close at times
Though seldom see each other real and near
Not always mountains in our way or wearied horseback treks
More often just a street we rarely cross
Or just a door we seldom open up from heart to heart
So as our memories to pour, our deeper talk
To pin on goose feet, tie to seagull wings
And hope for homing pigeons midst the things of life
So that even if the objects change and traces fade
We’ll still know how to recognise the trails
Feel the seasons and with our brothers speak
Of all the distant dawns and wearied days

Chains (2014)

When the school bell rang, I often slipped away
Why sit in sticky dimness
When outside was shining day
Its call came louder than the bells or rules
Led me off into the bushes, up into the hills
The teachers never learned to tie me down
And nor did jobs, the paper run, the supermarket hours
The office days and café years, the rise at dawn for work
You couldn’t simply slip into the bushes then and hide
But if hands don’t shirk their duties, eyes alert
Then who would ever see where hearts go roaming off in dreams?
Lucky ones if in our time-pressed gaze
We see the days of old go floating by
In all that luxury of drifting sky and tickling sun
A cherished book you lay aside, stretch out in idle thought
While now so much is squirrel-wheel life
So much is office ants that rush about in suit-clad streams
But are these chains like those on prisoners’ limbs
Or like the ones in jewellers’ shops, the gold and silver threads
Spun delicate and fine, and we can hang a pendant on the end
Of status, rank, success, whatever hope that swells our heads
And makes us enter, buy the chains ourselves to wear
Lucky if our tiredness comes from chains we choose
The kind that’s useful toil and pleasant ache
Such chains I’d gladly take, recalling too
Bright summer mornings of complaint and wielding the trowel
To dig out weeds and turn the soil
Teachers had their hated bell
My mother had her garden tasks that stole my play and games
And yet come evening I was worn and proud
And sweeter were the sky, the breeze, my freedom-snatching plans

[Here follows my translation of the poem that inspired my own poem above. It’s another example of ‘ruler’ poetry, again by the 18th century Qing dynasty emperor Yongzheng. He actually isn’t lying in the poem and really did work incredibly hard, and he certainly had every intention of keeping the emperor’s ‘chains’ firmly on his shoulders, but being one thing doesn’t stop one from being another too, and his nostalgia for quiet, contemplative moments and pursuits is equally genuine.]

Memories of the old times
Yongzheng

Once I had not glory to my name and deeds of lasting fame
But had a heart that never lost its calm and ease
And a constancy of life that flowed in feelings broad
I had the carefree years when I could know the taste
Of solitary pleasures, whereas now I search the crowd
To pick out men of talents, ever-pressing task
I have to educate the people, raise their morals in decline
Judge and weigh the world and its affairs
I read reports all night and hardly can recall
The springs and stones, their charms I once admired
But now at dawn the chime I hear
It hurries me to court to sit and keep my ears sharp
On all the countless bits of news, officials’ talk
My wearied heart caught up in never-ending whirl of work
To those days of leisured life and peace I can’t go back
To try would be a foolish dream
When on my shoulders now I wear these chains
And who can set me free?

The Big and the Small (2014)

See the spot of silver glisten on the lampshade’s metal edge
And know the moon hangs in the sky
Feel the wind grow restless, hear the bird song swell
And know that spring is on its way
The rainbow with its colours arching wide
I also saw it in a single petrol drop mixed with the rain
Of my childhood hilltops thrones I made
As if a monarch threw my gaze across the miles
While down below were just my courtiers of gorse
The bobbing boats and blowing sand
I roamed the high and low
From fishing trawlers’ bottom decks to palace halls
A diamond looked the same to me
In guarded relic kept from royal times
Or just the sun out flashing on the sea
I would not fight to drink the ocean
When the water in my cup is in any case its part
My thirst is not the kind you’d quench
With medals, gaudy bows and public noise
Behind the wealth and titles I’ve seen faded shrivelled hearts
And I’ve seen kings in humbler faces on my path
The puddles catch the heavens in a temporary frame
Even snatch the sun and pin it to their pools
But strange it is to see the dappled echo on the ground
And never lift one’s eyes from fallen crumbs of blue
To bigger seas above, the source from which the echoes came

[This poem also got its spark from something Emperor Yongzheng wrote – a traditional poetic couplet, which I translate below.]

Bamboo throws shadows on the window
You know the moon is high
Flower scent floats through the door
You know the spring is nigh

The Bell (2014)

Kids, we rang the bell
The ‘lest we forget’ one, clambered up
Above the names of other kids
Who grew and fell and made a list
Inscribed, names we never read
Caretaker from the staffroom stairs above
Poured a pail full of water on our heads
Teach us not to break the rules
He made the bell stay mute
Back then in school with lessons even set in stone
Yet never learned
Still feel cold water running down my face
Our peals hushed, the clapper stopped
We fled, and how we laughed that day
Our last within those halls
My final scene, the soldiers’ names, the stone, the sounds
We set in flow, began the round again
Lest we, lest we… no one talks that way
Forget? But life is always first-time taste
A pail emptied from an old man’s hands
Of war, of boys turned into chisel marks on marble plaques
He maybe knew, and we of merely prankish mind
Got trickling streams drip down our necks
The years gone on and water into tears turned
Speak sea drops, wind words write
My tongue a bell, my heart the earth in sleeping spread
Of graves, the unkempt bed
From which we took the stones
For the monuments on which I climbed, that heedless kid

Smart robot kiosk (2014)

[Down the road from my home in Moscow, there was a kiosk with real humans, selling fruit and vegetables. The humans in question were Central Asian migrants and the kiosk plain and humble. But it served the neighbourhood well. Later, it was destroyed in the big anti-kiosk and migrant campaign. An automated kiosk selling an array of fizzy drinks and junk food was installed instead. It was called ‘smart robot kiosk’]

Down by the station
Robot kiosk still shuttered up
With blank brown metal eyes
The tower forest past the tangled mesh of trains and tracks
Straws to suck the colours from the skies
And drink the dawn in burning copper flash
The dusk a pink and purple dress
To wrap around the evening’s growing chill
The steel, what would it speak if men worked tongues into its shaped and finished mass?
Of sands and stone a common song
As now the city skylines all alike
Only light to mark the shifting constant change
The robot kiosk’s metal eyes, they swallowed migrants come from distant desert lands
Or from the mountainsides to weigh a few of this, a pinch of that
Now obsolete, and all that matters is the ore, the quarry stuff, the mines
Just sands and stone and fire at its core
The robot kiosk wears a metal sign that says ‘I’m smart’
Its intellect no more than human grace
And sunset sky reminds me of another spread
Sahara miles, old work undone, materials unpicked
The ruined towns and swallowed streets of others who once
Likely too had pride and hung ‘smart’ signs in their hearts
Only the sky clothes stay, the light, the robes and threads

Small Moons (2014)

All days look like Christmas and the streets festooned
With shining baubles, thousand tiny moons
Old building fronts bear Atlas carved in stone
People pass below with lesser-burdened tread
They hold the whole world easy in their palms
City dweller eyes that used to flit and flee
When trapped in transport’s narrow walls
Relax now, even with the bodies packed
A million gazes settled on their screens
And former twiddling thumbs now dance and tap
The sailing ships upon the ocean waves
The streets a navigated Milky Way they seldom see
Not the upper parts at least
Not with silver slivers in their fingers pressed
What slice of moon above, a strip so thin
No perfect glowing orb for photos to upload
And spread in all their gift-wrapped hue
Not stained or cloaked by random shreds of cloud
A picture snapped to like and share
Between my window and the workers’ hostel roof
A crescent slips across the dark
And casts its careless beams to any lifted stare

Moscow in December (2014)

When days grow dark
When neon red that flecks the wintered street
And what were ruby drops now look like neighbour’s blood
The city signs, their numbers gleam and grow
That woman with a wheelbarrow full of cash for bread
Old schoolbook picture fallen from my head
The sun that fled and pale stingy light
I knew it here just nature’s resting time
Not real night
Then came the months of bitter seeds
Now falling rain, the neon spots and stains
Strangely echo nearby bombs and flames
When days stay dark
And hard to find a smile, a gift or hopeful hint
Dawn’s brief hand still reaches tender fingers through the sky
And strokes the snow with short-lived blush
And sets the puddle gems aglow
I know it’s not my place to cry
But rather thank for eyes that see
And heart that’s glad of small rewards
When days seem drained of all that made them bright
To catch the early morning moon
The blots of blue between the clouds
Is comforter and tears dried

No one asks the flowers (2015)

No one asks the flowers why they grow
For whom they bloom and raise their blossomed heads
The seeds were sown in hope of coloured dots and rows
To soften city lines and smooth and sooth the passing glance
Though often orphaned they stand
Soon dust-cloaked, faded, let their petals shed
Not knowing why
Or if they even caught a hasty urban eye
Thrust into competition too soon lost
With the long-last fabricated sort, the glossed-up virtual selves
Yet each spring still brings them back
A scarlet drop, a yellow splash, a pink and purple sash
A border edge or random clump or single stalk
To wave and tremble faintly in the fume-tinged wind
These precious pearls that not in anything see swine
Spread their summer flush where even drunkards sit
Tossing ciggy butts and bottles in their midst
These talents always bursting from the soil that hid their shine
To offer themselves in smiling sway
And never ask how many gazes stray to their side
Or did any heart appreciate their miracle, their work
As willing orphans always coming back to wait
Their recompense the rain and autumn’s snatching hand
Then the rubbish sack into which the fallen things are packed
My petalled teachers tell me not to sigh
If never any lingering or fonder eye I meet
But do as they and keep on bearing fruit
Even if it falls unseen and fades back into the ground
No one asks the flowers why they grow
And still they do and share their blood and life with sun and sky

Dawn for Free (November 2015)

No matter how fancy, no festive lights can match
The dawn, the tower blocks awash in its copper rinse
Aglow, aflame in its million burning spears
Sky maiden makes the steel-framed city a mirror in her hand
Sets her rippling tresses free across its roofs
Blows her pink blush down upon its waking cheeks
Unlocks the heavy diamond clusters from her ears
And scatters their sparkles across the window panes
The workmen come with cranes to string the festive garlands high
In sparing jewelry dab to cheer the days and light the nights
But no matter the money and effort they spend
They’ll never match the sky, its gleaming gifts
In ocean flow from city end to end
Pour pearls in not just central city streets
And dress every building in rosy silks and sun rays’ beaded cape

Steelwork Summer (Aug. 2016)
Blast furnace sky swings down
Pours a molten mix the way they lay roads
Press it in, choke you up on din and dust
Slink along the walls, close
Hugging that stingy strip of shade
Once summer was a skipping girl
Only now and then might fire in scarlet blush
Now it’s the sweaty worker’s weary grin
He flashes through rutted blackened days
Of rolling sweltering lines across the city life
Oh yes, we work it, summer, fuel the forge
Temper the steel

Between the bells and Europe’s biggest mall (2016)

Autumn king on a tree stump throne
Dappled drunk bent deep in last night’s dregs
Treasures strewn through the dew-damp grass
Bottle tops and foil scraps made morning gold
Worker slumped against a crumbling wall
Come to share a solitary meal with birdsong shreds and shifting sunlight shafts
Ripple-rustle boughs and humble plastic bag
Their sighs his distant home and purplish mountain hue
The city sky turned slack and weakened after summer’s toil
Between the Sunday bells and Europe’s biggest mall
Sounds pared down and traffic stream grown faint
Old railings throw their lace-work shadows to the ground
Youthful jogging legs bejewelled in sun-cut lines
Slow tread behind with waning puckered face
Above them all the trees unpick their lattice roof
Ease the way for short and feeble days to pitch their light
The pigeons cluster close and nestle tight
Into the sandy patch that rushing workday feet made soft
And tiny sour apples fall, bruised balls of pale jade
Share fruit scent with the dandelions’ vivid yellow laughs

Mid-autumn (2016)

Plucked from before the hulks of houses going up
My childhood sea and spot of southern sky
The cornflower eyes northern poets wove into their songs
And eastern poets sang the autumn high
Climbed hills to catch the moon
Timid flower placed inside a Chinese vase
Enamel green the ocean waves
Silvered summit at the rim
Of years carried in this ebbing tide
I had many autumns and many gilded nights
Air crisp, sky long and blue, blue
Cornflower-hue of splendid time
Pressed as scavenged leaves between the pages of old books
Verse the fixing glue when flower lives are but a glimpse
A faded head and sea gone dry, the petals lost
The poets leant from their pavilions to fish the gentle orb
And roam the stars
I roam the concrete paths and pick the crumbs
A snatch of light between the clouds

Natasha’s Bells (2017)

Disconsolate exile’s heart
She said
Europe’s bells are so heavy, dreary, dull
As evening tugs its melancholy tight
Long roll of single-noted sound
Bong…Bong…spare and plain
She said
More like a hammer driving nails sharp
The coffin lid, the miles, sunset’s final flame
Not so those Moscow bells
Ringing riotous across the roofs
Jingle-jangle silver-sparkling swell
Laughing sea that speaks in pitch and toss tongues
Filled with years, layers, sing a city’s song
Drown the drills and dust and urban renovation din
Sing the sky, the spring, the clement rain
She said
Those bells were soothing balsam
Come winding through the lattice trees and rattle of the trams
Those sparrow-frolic dancing sunspot bells
She said
Speak home

Mid-Autumn
Beijing, Oct 6, 2017

A scattering
Of leaves paled
Old book faded, yellowed, thin
As might be dusty archive rows
Where they keep the deeds done and people gone
Their candles snuffed, their moon consigned to poems
Lost amidst the pages no one reads
Or time-worn marks on once grand stone
A steady stream
Of rippling people flow
Ocean froth, thrown, tossed and torn
As might dampen miles of sand
Become cement, become the many roads and towers
That cut and thrust in gullies, peaks
My moon adrift above the neon and the thick-pressed heads

Nara (2017)

[Nara, in Japan, was the first place I arrived after leaving Moscow. It was such a contrast]
Cleansed of that close-packed country
Pressed tight between the jutting hills
The bullet trains, the blinking beating neon sea
Big-eyed robot vision frenzied cute
Life plastic-wrapped in layers lacquered bright
From that sticky fading day seized the sudden sense of small
The pine tree stir and creeping cool
The lonely lamp and temple eaves hung soft against the dusk
Round white moons suspended in a paper row
Swaying in a stilled and thickened night
Water’s trickle, crunch of centuries and stone
Silent shadows rocked and rippled in the light-streaked pond

Manabe jiwa (2017)
This place
Moored only for a moment when a silent sailor casts his salty rope
Sharp-cut in skittish lines of morning drawn thin
Silvered dancing sea and dappled stone
Dark wood, bent old men, and fish
Smallness, shrine and shadow tucked in dusty bend
Between the storms and fate and cicada-song days

Edge of Australia (Perth, December 2017)

[I wrote this while visiting my brother and about to embark on a new and uncertain journey to Vienna]
The map edge of a child’s roaming eye
When the world was pinned to a wall
As distant as the knife-gash moon above the scrub
I follow the line between
the frothing sea and squelch of sand
Unknown ocean and wind clouds feather-tailed
stretched across the sky
I walk the ships’ wakes and the airplane trails
Taste strangeness in this brother’s land
I tread the exile’s tears and voyager’s hopeful heart
And wear sunset, seize the stars still pinpoint faint
The crows and cockatoos and stirrings in the bush
This quiet purpled hour full of aspirin fizz
Dissolves in my memory glass
Drink of dreams and days
My journey date the melted gold of sinking final rays
In windows caught as if a sudden greeting
Someone’s warming flame

Red (Vienna, January 2018)
Leaden light
After 100 years of cold, a century of waiting
for dawn to burst bright, to sing and shine
with all the sweat and blood and dreams
The darkest hour, the dullest month, the longest chill
In our wobbly world
In our drought-cracked, rain-choked, cloud-cloaked lands
Red flags stored in timid spring bloom
in younger hearts alive with song and strength
And carefully preserved like funeral best
to dress the memory of former hopes
Of flared trousers or paisley we laughed
that they’ll never come back, or ‘80’s style
or 1917
Face goes down to the whipping wind, the stinging snow
the marching lines, the chant, the union, the cause
The weight of winter, the shortened stingy days
And modern purveyors of miracles and might
Toss fake stars and phony flames to the streets and photo-eager screens

Rumi was a Refugee (Vienna, February 2018)
Rumi was a refugee
Not first a son of Konya
but travelled long miles to reach those sun-flattened plains
How many of them
Scattered stars or dandelions popped up in the grass
In spring burst and hope for clement skies
And for gardeners’ eyes to be blind to what some call mere weeds
How many of us
Hearts coming back to where childhood feet once ran
Lucky if the map is still intact
If sounds still echo not in our memories alone
If on continuity the sun shines down
And one might glimpse a once fresh face grown old
with only seasons, years and age

Winter in a Foreign Land (Vienna 2018)
It’s an old refrain they like
Winter was far colder once, and the snowdrifts
Rose to our waists, and the air
It was diamond hard and it bit
Locals pull their years about them thick and snug
Eyes shine with that sudden proud glint
The winters, they were fierce once.
The wind hears them and tucks knives in its gusts
Sky breathes frosted sighs across the roofs
And the sausage stand is closed
As if it too caught chill
Only the Chinese keep dishing out fast-fried warmth
Behind their flimsy walls, recalling harsher days
Me, what do I know of all these seasons and their songs?
Winter, not my southern storms, but the one of books
The proper one they have up in their northern lands
Was numbing, world turned white
And pressed between the blue and the snow-swept seas
Stark, stabbing, bright to sting the eyes
Piled thick over Russian fields, and not unloved
Even now with more fickleness and slush
Not just a season but a sense of what it is to be
When steps sink and skid
And life breath hangs visible a second
Then chills and falls

Sisyphus (2018)

Remember Sisyphus rolling his rock?
I already stood atop the summit then
In my student days between sea and sky
The city stretched in shining curve below
I already knew the tumbling stone, the futile chase
And always retrieved my load, worn to the touch
Later, on France’s crumbling coast
The heaving waves, the sheer cliffs trimmed emerald with dampened grass
A pebble in my hand, stamped with the fossil mark of ancient times
Clifftop fragments of the continent fallen and swallowed in the tides
I followed the lattice work of shadow and light
The world’s weave, the stitch by stitch, the step by step, the climb
Endless circles, sand and ocean froth
But I had always known, even before the books and words
That Sisyphus sucked in the view
And smiled at the swooping gulls

Architecture of a tyrant (2018)
Nearly half my life lived in Stalin’s shadow
Yes, he was cast in the stone silhouettes of my skyline
Soft in the dawns and stark in the sunset’s flames
He dogged me through the streets
Woven through grand facades and metro station pomp
Grey and stern he spread broad along my road
My wide, wide thoroughfare built in solemn frame for tanks to roll by
He lurked like the cobwebs in the corners of my high, high ceilings
“Ours is a Stalin building” – said with pride
More than just shadows – echoes, and ever less dissonant
Grit broken down so fine you could breathe it in with the nostril-pricking chill
Like islands, like volcanoes rising sheer from the waves
Majestic from afar
You had to get close to glimpse the cockroaches, the faded shades and musty feel
Sense not just apartment rows but prison cells and watching eye
You had to go on foot across the vastness and turn small
Be dwarfed in that great desert of symbols and cement
And yet, they say, the people love their tyrants, yes, shed tears
Or swiftly forget, or see the thaw, the rosy clouds, the ice grown thin
And one can hope a moment in that ringing vibrant light
Just a moment
Before the seasons shift and ruthless sun beats down
On Stalin’s marble peaks and concrete seas

The Water Tower (2018, Vienna)
Put water in a tower
Like the old days of hiding towns behind walls
Or treasures heaped in vaults and grain in barns
And fear of armies, bandits, mice
This city ringed with muted mountain blue
Silent slopes beyond scored by streams
Set free, like rain, like burst pipes, rapid-running taps
Now only that empty brick husk to whisper tales and warn
Of deserts, of sieges, of captives and thirst

Krasnopresnenskaya (2018)

It’s the names that speak
The barricades set stiff in stone
The workers’ moulded fists
These rulers, that’s how they like their revolution
Carefully preserved the sculpted struggle, the silent crowds
But the names, they whisper, breathe and sigh
The factories, the crooked streets, the slopes down to the river’s edge
The higgledy-piggledy tumble of it all, the houses, church domes, lanes
And these broad avenues not so long before were rimmed
with gentle clutter of seasons, days
small windows hiding all the former empire
come bearing greens and fruit and colour when the snow fell
Bulldozed, evicted, ‘beautified’, ‘civilised’, driven out and gone
But the memory still speaks, the place-filled heart, the archive eye

The Ocean Path
(Jinguashi, Taiwan)
2018

Tremble of a heart suspended in the vast expanse
Then sudden, the islands, speck that bursts
between sea and sky
proverb talk of small things
of the entire ocean in a drop
a tiny tear pool, a mirror glass
of mist and mountains with the gold sucked out
I’ve been mined and melancholy
laced in silvered solace too.
I walked those damp-draped streets
and saw simplicity of form
the hills and houses blotted, tumbling steep
I saw Pacific rim and islands scattered in the waves
as if my stepping stones to forge a sure path
across the world

The Pavilion of Floating Views (Nara, 2018)

Once, this night would have been just so,
pearled and lantern-studded, merging with the sailing moon,
laughter spilling from the wondrous throng.
Though how much thicker now the snake of shuffling feet
and not faces glued but upheld screens to snatch
every angle, every inch of scene
for memory.
And the Pavilion of Floating Views
would have known too this silvered day
and contemplative figures, heads bent in the shade
Though these ones scroll through captive slices
of the ever-changing flow
while the broader skies and seasons drift on by.

Anniversary (20 Sept 2018)

[The first anniversary of my leaving Moscow – for Vladivostok and then onwards]
Into the dawn, flying east
Into the past, the echoes, the mist lifting from the hills
Come to climb the summits and wear the wind
Come in homage to my teachers
As if I’d find them there among the rusting ships
Silver ribbon sea between the slopes
Our greatest bridge not those looming concrete spans
but the common ocean lapping on our shores
on which the flimsy vessel of my heart still sails

Joining the Modern World (2018)
Fractured, assailed, splintered, split
I’m not speaking of the rivalries and rifts
between the foolish few that pull after them
peoples and lands into blood, fury and flame
or the endless circling around a point
of grandeur and glory, however futile a sovereign dead end it may be
I’m talking way, way smaller
of the urban multitude in fretful fitful night
city-lit in tossing stirring heave
and I, who so long sailed on the remnants of my sea-jewelled home
through seasons, skies and wind song
join the sleepless horde in bedroom battle marches
They tell me it was the full moon riding high
that snatched my dreams and left the empty hours
But down in my city canyon
I was ignorant it even shone

I am Venice (2018)
Sometimes, I am Venice
That splendid rim of spires and domes
A needless frame for the sea
But crafted with such persevering care
That floating maze of gloom and thin-sliced light
of alleys, squares, and furtive, flitting sun
That pressing physicality of dank and stone
and life and aching, colour-catching flesh
It could try looking regal in a humbler, kinder place
More locked in land
Less mingled with the sky
Safer from the tides’ indifferent rise
There, between the mists and the waves
Great fancy brooch pinned to the sea
Aware it’s but adornment
Flimsily attached
Akin to the froth, the boats’ wake, the sun shafts and clouds

Santiago de Compostela (2019)
Some still tread the miles
Like the pilgrims of old
In this high-speed life
In these concrete-creased lands
Some still glimpse the sudden spires
Caught between roofs
And bathe in the gold of saints and dawn
Perhaps not in the streets of Santiago ends the quest
Not between the bells and midst priests and prayers
But at the ocean’s edge
Between the blue expanse and seagulls’ cries
Devotion not in journeys’ start or end
But in the gorse flower
The gleaming stone upon the sand
The stained-glass marvels in the mundane walls and lanes
The cathedral heart ever soaring high

Jet Trails (2019)
Jet trails
Once they snatched my jealous eye
Up into the blue beyond, the lands unseen
Following the silver dot and slender trail
Like snow ridge, like sea froth, like clouds of magic and dreams
Now they slice the sky
With hopscotch lines, or stitches
Like an old darned sock, like the paler skin of scars
Silver flash no longer steals me away
The almost constant hum like that of flies
And the trails parasitic tapeworms
Even fruit, my mother said
Even the apple that kept doctors at bay
Too much of anything would make you sick
Suck the spells hollow and empty the air
No butterflies to flower flit, no death-bent moths for flames
No innocence

Taming the Wilds (2019)
There were lands beyond
Where certainty stopped and the songs
were as jagged as the scarred, scoured peaks
The mournful wail, wind’s whine, weary, dusty tug
of homesick thoughts banked up in a reservoir, a pool
of grand infrastructure sweep
Sighs and heartstrings girded, concrete reinforced
Bridged, dammed, connected
The harsh realms’ haunting desolation, the locust-sending lands
Not one wall built but many lines
of costly folly, breached, broken, and no, you cannot see them from the moon
or look up for silver solace in the sometimes desperate night
Toppled towers swallowed in the sandstorms, tyrants’ dreams
Dead fish to mask a rotting despot’s stench, a corpse
borne home in age-old sham, that pantomime
of power games and stopping time with pills, with fraud
A humble room and hungry cheerless hours
Fled, the rulers, from their gilded halls, their lies and shame
Today,
A coal stove, portrait, cluttered yard
Came via the toll road, the concrete sea, the winter smog sky
No foreign flute to send sorrow, but the fireworks bazaar
outside the wall, sold the cheapest, brightest stars

Arsenal (2019)

In eerie song they pass, the trains at night

Not a melody, but still, a tune of rails, wheels

In the moonlight, towered over

by construction cranes and gaping frames

to plug the gaps in city space

And I, I listen to the train song

Lucky, not yet hemmed, fenced, cemented in

I watch my poplar friends nod and sway

breathe in the Hapsburg dust

the sediment of soldiers, barracks, bombs

Like a cloister, some say, like a prison

Brooding, grim, and yet

one comes to love the train screech and the guns

the wars bundled up behind museum walls

the only sentries now the tree heads waving in the wind

Hong Kong 2019

I recall the sultry night of sky spliced

The island neon-wrapped in gaudy pride

of those who imagined gold and British law

might keep the boat steady and the rock anchored firm

And I recall the rainstorm’s brutal hug

My umbrella too frail and thin for that battering rush

As if an umbrella could save from onslaught, floods and skies gone dark

As if a British pledge truly had the weight of its ink and solemnity

An umbrella snatched and snapped, but stubborn hands yet take that broken form

Dwarfed in the canyons of glass and finance

But seething as a riled sea at storm

Garish walls of words strung between the buildings

Setting the night ablaze in advertising whirl

How much plainer and simpler a spoken “no”

How much stronger too

Like a bell, a gong, a gun salute, a monument, a burning flare

Don’t tame the night (2019)

It was a savage night up the garden path

Not pitch black, star-studded, light speckled

But it shuddered and shook

Full of the ogres, beasts and fears still flowing in our age-old blood

Savage night of caveman times, feeble flame and trembling torch

A firefly, a moon path, a star map, a milky stream spilt across the vault

A studied night of curious child eyes following the waxing, waning

Wandering, picking out the planets, pinning names to that boundless sea

A cherished night became a friend

once you let the eyes, and even more the heart, adjust

Stolen now, or rather, washed, like in a marbling bath

Or like mould, all blotches, smears and stains

A city fuzz projected to the skies

But then, mine was a savage night not made to lament

Our urban dreams are bright-lit, neon-writ

Never sleep, never stop, never take that darkness by the hand

A recipe for loneliness (2019)

If life was anchored and the map a simple one

of doors awaiting our knock and lights well known

we’d wear village smiles

A tethered life, passport pages empty

The bucket filled with season’s fruit, perhaps, but short on places seen

As if miles travelled were the true measure of our “thirst for this world”

If life were an endless drifting stream to scroll down

we’d be unattached and free

No cables now, a wireless age

An age of islands and restless silt

ferried in the flows

Elation maybe

Once the years were like lines etched on a palm

Now cordless, we can float and city hop

And make the skies an express lane

We can wear selfie smiles and find the doors

always open for our temporary, paying stay

New Year (Dec 31, 2019)

I was a southern child

And so those were summer days

With little sense of turning point

or need to brighten the skies with brief flame

I still ignore the champagne clink and sleep-tugged hours

Even with the snow and the bitter night

where they watched “Irony of Fate”

with its tender tunes that haunted

long after the toasts and midnight feasts had passed

But I could sing them anytime

or turn a new leaf, walk a new mile

I could marvel at moon glow

and at dawn’s fire burst and golden streams

and summon promise, hope, renewal

What of symbols then?

Shared meanings and that special warmth of custom and crowd?

Don’t we smear enough the heavens thick with our everyday lights?

What was once a whooshing “ooh” of child’s delight

now echoes war sounds

Or the countdown comes like an hourglass with the sand running thin

Yet I’m still there

Stretched around the world in a string of friends and loved ones

Speaking best wishes across the time zones, seasons and tongues

Some already woken with the new sun

Some hurling noise and glitter at the old

Spring in the time of plague (2020)

Time is a thin wall

Echo of long-gone days

stirring like the twigs still frail

Spring blossom’s brief burst

scattered too soon

And again, as of old

faces missed, friends unseen

A solitary figure bent in letter-writing pose

As if we were all now posted to distant realms

All now filled with farewells and with greetings from afar

And the wait, the sighing nights

while spring’s swelling joy is that much harder on the heart

midst plague talk, fears and cities gone still

Journeying lonely roads left off the modern maps

But the poets of old trod trails

and left lantern words to guide

Journeys (2020)

Seize the sun-shaft moment
That brief light
Like flashing silver, like old gold
And wrap it close
That warming touch
Like a beloved coat, like hand knit
For here are realms to be explored
The hinterlands and farther provinces of one
we perhaps thought loved and known
But that was only the shifting coastline
Only the beach sands carried in and out on the tides we call life
Ride the sudden still
Follow the silence in its skyward stream
Take out the maps
of inner roads with merging lanes and rest bays

My translation of the opening lines of Alexander Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman

On that empty wave-swept shore
He stood in swell of thoughts turned grand
Gazed distant down the river spreading broad
A flimsy boat sped lonely through its flow
Scattered on the marshy mossy banks
Dark specks of huts, poor shelter for the humble Finns
The forests deep in sunless shroud of fog
From all around let rustling murmur grow
And there he thought:
From here we shall strike fear in the Swede
A city raise to knock his pride and put him in his place
By nature’s grace and destiny’s command
A window onto Europe we will cut
And firm shall stand, this sea before our feet
And lay new thoroughfares across the waves
New roads to bring all countries here as guests
To feast in our most generous embrace
A hundred years passed, this city flush with youth
The charm and jewel of northern lands
From forests’ depths and marshy damp
A splendid work was raised, now proud it stands
Where low banks once knew only nature’s cast-off son
The Finnish fisher come alone, old net he tossed in murky depths
These very shores now noisy throng
And graceful building rows pressed close
In crowd of palaces and towers, sails swarm
Ships come from all around the world
To moor amidst this wealth
The Neva’s banks are now in granite clad
Across the waters bridges hang
The islands too wear clothes
Of gardens’ green and shade
This younger sister, royal town
To make old Moscow pale and fade
Like a widow in her purple gown
Before a new queen come in grand parade
I love you, Peter’s creation
I love your stern and sculpted aspect
The Neva’s stately flow
And granite-clad embankment
Your iron lace of railings
The pensive nature of your nights
Translucent twilight, moonless pallor
When in my room, no lamp to burn
I read and write
And sleeping blocks of stone stand clear in deserted streets
While the Admiralty’s spire shines
And darkness finds itself confined and kept from golden skies
As dawn hurries, chasing dawn, and thirty minutes’ night retires.

Some of my translations of Chinese poems

Anchored at the Huangpu by night
Wang Zhideng

Down on the Huangpu’s sandy banks
Waves slap the sky
Night chill floats like fog across the town
Willows stand dim in dusky shroud
Moonlight falls thick
Nets turn heavy with fish grown still
The rising tide pushes its swell
People wait for the boat to set sail

Night at the River
Tang Shigu

Lonely autumn on the river
Fishermen’s lights dot the night
Lift my head to see the moon tip faint gleam upon the trees
Shore birds startled by the shimmering waves
Soon tuck their heads again in sleep
Cold dew clings damp and keeps the fireflies from flight

My response to Tang Shigu’s Night at the River (Aug. 2015)
The fireflies live in books
The fishermen gone, pleasure boats trace shining lines through city lights
arranged in rows, blocks and sheets
with scant place for moonbeams, even full
Our birds know only darkness trimmed
Ignore electric glow and neon flash
Only autumn stays the same, damp and grey
With fading colours, naked trees
This constancy of the heart’s lonely sigh

Jotting down the night scene from a boat
Cha Shenxing

Spied a fisherman’s lamp in the moonless night
As if a firefly’s faint dot, single lonely light
Soft wind set the waves astir
Scattered the glow and filled the river with stars

Yan Jidao
Butterfly longing for flowers

That time at the west tavern, got drunk
Woke, the memories fled
Like spring flees as dreams
and autumn clouds fly on by
Each goes their way, so easy to part
Through the window slips a slanting moon
to light my restless wait for sleep
And on the painted screen a scene
of southern streams and mountain peaks
Drink stains on my clothes
Jotted themes for poems
tread so many cheerless traces through my thoughts
Red candle shares my pain
only there is nothing it can do or change
but take my place and drip its tears
Into the chill and lonely night

Wang Anguo
Tranquil pleasures

The birds, they wear their chatter thin
But spring still takes its leave
Garden cloaked in fallen flower red
Fine brocades spattered by the dirt and damp
After the night brought wind and rain
Just yesterday, the evening had me there
Delighting in the singsong girl’s debut
She plucked her pipa
Just like that palace favourite of days gone by
But her morning face wore thoughts that chased the skies
Not her wish to linger in these rich man’s halls
Rather dance in the spring breeze
Like the poplar flowers whirling at their ease

Yan Shu
Over roads and sands

This wayside pavilion their goodbye place
Midst farewell feast and parting songs
And then two friends obscured in the flower-fragrant dust
But still look back
The one who stays, stops in forest shade
And waits, his stilled horse neighs
The one who leaves, rests his oars a moment on the gentle waves
To turn his gaze the way he came
Painted walls around a saddened heart
The tower high, but the eye can only see so far
The sinking sun sends only ripples on their distant way
The pain of parting knows no limit and no end
A friend’s fond thought will follow to the sky’s fringe and the earth’s last edge

Yan Jidao
To the tune of Mulan hua

Again, the east wind blows its heartless gusts
Smears flowers thick upon the ground like scarlet makeup blush
Emerald tower’s curtain no screen for sorrow’s view
Last year’s melancholy washes in anew
Am I not a fool to fret so over spring’s remains?
At every step shed my tears in vain
Instead, I’ll fill my wine cup to the brim
This full of fallen flowers I need to drink my sorrow dim

Another poem of my own, inspired in response.

People Petals
Fallen flowers do not linger in these days
When spring is greenhouse years and air-conditioned rooms
And workers plant the flowers for a time, then take their withered heads away
But no, it’s not in vain to fret and cry for all that falls and fades
The careless wind and strewn ground
A season mirror sending us our hearts
The flowers as if people petals that blossomed in our past
Faces gone, friends and neighbours, Christmas present aunts
Run to gather up those bits of life and stay their shades
Press them in my memory books and glue them fast
People petals still spread blush and dab the earth’s cheeks bright
The roads inside us still need tears to wash away the dust
Be summer rains and clear the skies for autumn gold
Even with the east wind shut outside and seasons small
We still know time and still grow old and feel how sorrow turns
Still the sowers, gardeners, sweepers
Still the faded fruits, the ashes and the earth

Su Shi (Su Dongpo)
Raise my glass and ask the empty night
When will the moon shed its glow?
In those heavenly palaces above, this year, this day, do they even know?
I’d like to ride the wind back, but fear those dazzling reaches, that jade expanse
Too high to hide from the chill
Dancing with the shadows
I’d rather be here in this world
Now sliding through the curtained door, the moonlight steals my sleep
What quarrel has it to pick with us that it always hangs so round come parting time?
We know sorrows and joys, leave and reunite
The moon waxes, wanes, is sometimes clouded, sometimes bright
You never could have it all
Though I hope that life will give us years yet, and even thousands of miles apart
Let us share these same moonlight streams

Zhang Lei
Spring sorrow

Ask the spring why such haste?
You rush by with this mingled wind and rain
My little yard, my flowers tended with care
Barely got the chance to bloom
Petals rich and red, they fall too soon
Better the willow’s drooping lace to hold its colour firm
Through spring’s embrace
Hope to make it stay, a spring that never grows old
But the flowers’ briefness leaves a melancholy taste
It’s not the season’s sorrow, just the human heart
We who make what’s natural weigh so hard
Swill fine wines to soothe and still the hurt
The peach trees shed their flowers to scatter new seeds
And not because cruel spring would strip them bare
It’s not the spring, our source of pain
But years piling up and the chase for deeds and fame
The spring is just the precious cup we raise
And merge with it our overflowing hearts in the same old meeting rite

Grotto Fairy’s Song
Li Yuanying
Snow clouds scatter, leave
Spring settles in anew
Poplars, willows, tender looks, make eyes their way
More marvelous still, plum blossom’s first faint dab
From afar as if a maiden’s laughing gentle blush
Spring’s savour isn’t in the thick and fragrant fullness
More touching is the dash of colour, hint of scent
By the Day of Pure Brightness all is a hundred violet hues, thousand shades of red
Flowers in a riot spread
But by then, it’s all half-gone, that sweet taste of spring
So hasten to catch the early time and seize the finest light
Don’t fear the days still cold, nothing a little wine won’t warm.

Spring at Xie Pond
Li Zhiyi
The last scraps of chill have left and the rains too have passed
The Day of Pure Brightness has been and gone
Fallen flowers scatter colour on the path, wind breathes light ripples on the pond
Fledgling swallows flutter across the yard, flying catkins catch on my clothes
This is the finest time, this twilight hour
This taste that goes so deep, thick like wine
Only I shrink in garments now too big, body grown thin
Parted, you fill my thoughts
Together, only to part once more
Why even seek to make the meetings frequent?
Better to simply no longer part
But indifferent to our lot the sky does not grow old
And lonely stays our human road
Who then to hear me speak my sorrows, only sigh them to the willow out the front

Plum Blossom
Lu You

Past the post station and the broken bridge
Plum blossom flowers alone
In the sunset hour speaks its sorrows on its own
No one to receive them but the wind and rain
Not some conscious plan to flower first and vie to greet the spring
Nor heed the envy jealous nature’s other flowers pour
Cart wheels rumble by and crush the fallen blossoms’ scattered fragments in the mud
Just a trace of fragrance still drifting as before