Travelling Verses - Nanjing

Nanjing has been the unhappy site of two terrible massacres: the annihilation of the Taiping rebels in 1864; and the Japanese atrocity of 1937. In the gardens behind Qixia monastery there are grottoes containing ancient Buddha sculptures beheaded by the Taiping rebels who were intolerant monotheists, and again vandalised in the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.

Qixia Temple, Nanjing, May 2008

In the time of the madness of power

the great river Yangtzi bore many headless

bodies with a stately curling motion

to no far shore but to a melting

of the flesh of the loved ones in ocean.

 

These ancient Buddhas each in a niche

cradling tributes of flowers and incense

are all beheaded like the Nanjing martyrs.

Their stone shoulders and still bellies endure

and their dwindling necks are eloquent as art is.

Lingering between Heaven and Earth Forever

At The Lingering Garden in Suzhou there is a plaque erected over the entrance reading, "Lingering between Heaven and Earth Forever."

By The Lingering Garden's lily-pond

grandparents are "lingering

between heaven and earth forever"

with children who're throwing crumbs

where golden fish are gathering.

They smile for they know forever

does not last long though it is

forever and the last of it

can last as long as anything.

Five Days Practice

Virtue and holiness are of the first day

and fade, as it is of the second day

to clatter on the stairs, be guilty, and to fail.

Clamouring lovers complain on the third

 

and justifications ring in the great silence.

The fourth is a day of clenching the thumbs

the brow, the teeth. The method, the method,

I hiss, till dawn smothers each weak star

 

for the fifth comes that wagtails should laugh

at the powerless moon, that cows should moo,

that air should taste of a dewy dawn

where the crow wets her belly in pasture

 

and we walk with whispering steps

to the threshold, bowing into bell ripples.