Hong Kong: Songs from the Rooftops
“In these shaken times, who more than you holds
In the wind, our bittermelon, steadily facing
Worlds of confused bees and butterflies and a garden gone wild”
--梁秉鈞, Bittermelon
III
Wan Chai: The Sky Red as Your Name Buckled in a Letter
Once, beneath the sky red above us, you wrote your father in red ink,
a forlorn chance for fear to visit his life,
you spoke a lullaby in my ear when finished, a snake in the shape of a hat containing a pachyderm
a tongue of torn letters inked on cheap rice paper, pressed desperate as passenger on that tram long-ago
cramped
against the green tile above the men searching for body and salvation, and some anew new
piu haak, you once wrote him, until you looked over the roof edge and watched lives scatter
swarming as the far-off waves battering your heart.
the sky red as your name buckled in a letter: 木心
“Even in the dark recesses of bramble and cave, light spiders in
and allows the moon to thread a silver'd path,
outward to you, Baba, even in winter, full-bellied,
you wobble and space my hope toward home,
you wobble and space my heart home.”
And then it was sent
and so it began with the knotted sound of a rung bell wrong in a temple, the flutter of a golden silk robe and the line on an old woman’s hand who once spoke across a room you would live as long as a bird at sea and you read, then after the flight around your mouth, and the sky again red and our fingers red, and the clock in the room red and all the lines in the rain long in their lacquered reflections
red:
our stitching, my love, red.
