Chinese Shadowplay
I saw an ancient shadow play
In Shanghai, China, far away.
I could not understand the songs
The warble, clatter low and long;
The locals too had lost the words,
And told me so with smiles absurd.
They asked me how I came to see
This spectacle in front of me.
But I was lost in puppetry –
The flattened models hard to see
That flashed behind the stretch of skin
And bayed like ghosts above the din.
The form was strange, from long ago
And gave me stories I couldn’t know.
My Chinese tender, knowledge weak
I made up stories so they’d speak.
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I saw a man behind the screen,
Just his face and his hand
Clutched about a bow
Dragging across an erhu.
He rocked with the music
Lost in the melody,
Pentatonic, ebbing about the puppets
Projected on the skin.
But he didn’t see the stories either.
He didn’t see the intrigues of principates.
He had his own stories.
I couldn’t imagine them,
But they sat there on his face
And didn’t need to speak.