Across wide lotus-ponds of light
I marked a giant firefly’s flight.
And the lady, rosy-red,
Open her fan, closed her fan,
Stretched her hand toward Chang, and said:
“Do you remember,
Ages after,
Our palace of heart-red stone?
Do you remember
The little doll-faced children
With their lanterns full of moon-fire,
That came from all the empire
Honoring the throne? –
The loveliest fete and carnival
Our world had ever known?
The sages sat about us
With their heads bowed in their beards,
With proper meditation on the sight.
Confucius later said we lived aright…
And this gray bird, on that day of spring,
With a bright-bronze breast and a bronze-brown wing,
Captured the world with his carolling.
Late at night his tune was spent.
Peasants,
Sages,
Children,
Homeward went,
And then the bronze bird sang for you and me.
We walked alone,
our hearts were high and free.
I had a silvery name, I had a silvery name,
I had a silvery name – do you remember
The name you cried beside the tumbling sea?”
Chang turned not to the lady slim -
He went to his work, ironing away;
But she was arch and knowing and glowing.
And the bird on his shoulder spoke for him.
“Darling… darling… darling… darling…”
Said the Chinese nightingale.
…………………………………………….
The great gray joss on a rustic shelf,
Rakish and shrewd, with his collar away,
Sang impolitely, as though by himself,
Drowning with his bellowing the nightingale’s cry:
“Back through a hundred,hundred years
Hear the waves as they climb the piers,
Hear the howl of the silver seas,
Hear the thunder!
Hear the gongs of holy China
How the waves and tunes combine
In a rhythmic clashing wonder,
Incantation old and fine:
«Dragons,dragons,Chinese dragons;
Red fire-crackers, and green fire-crackers,
And dragons,dragons,Chinese dragons».”
Then the lady, rosy-red,
Turned to her lover Chang and said:
“Dare you forget that turquoise dawn
When we stood in our mist-hung velvet lawn,
And worked a spell this great joss taught
Till a God of the Dragons was charmed and caught?
From the flag high over our palace-home
He knew to our feet in rainbow-foam –
A king of beauty and tempest and thunder
Panting to tear our sorrows asunder,
A dragon of fair adventure and wonder.
We mounted the back of that royal slave
With thoughts of desire that were noble and grave.
We swam down the shore to the dragon-mountains,
We whirled to the peaks and the fiery fountains.
To our secret ivory house we were borne.
We looked down the wonderful wing – filled regions
Where the dragons darted in glimmering legions.
Right by my breast the nightingale sang;
The old rhymes rang in the sunlit mist
That we this hour regain –
Song-fire for the brain.
When my hands and my hair and my feet you kissed,
When you cried for your heart’s new pain,
What was my name in the dragon-mist,
In the rings of rainbowed rain?”
“Sorrow and love, glory and love”,
Said the Chinese nightingale.
“Sorrow and love, glory and love”,
Said the Chinese nightingale.
And now the joss broke in with his song:
“Dying ember, bird of Chang,
Soul of Chang, Do you remember? –
Ere you returned to the shining harbour
There were pirates by ten thousand
Descended on the town
In vessels mountain-high and red and brown,
Moon-ships that climbed the storms
and cut the skies.
On their prows were painted
terrible bright eyes.
But I was then a wizard and a scholar and a priest;
I stood upon the sand;
With lifted hand I looked upon them
And sunk their vessels
