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What is it makes the stranger? Say, oh eyes!
Because I was journeying far, sailing alone,
Changing one belt of stars for the northern belt,
Men in my country told me, ‘You will be strange —
Their ways are not our ways; not like ourselves
They think, suffer and dream.’
So sat I silent, and watched the stranger, why he was strange.
But now, having come so far, shed the eight cloaks of the wind,
Ridden ponies of foam, and the great stone lions of six strange cities.
What is it makes the stranger? Say, oh eyes!
Eyes cannot tell. They view the selfsame world —
Outer eyes vacant till thoughts and pictures view them,
Inner eyes watching secret paths of the brain.
Hands? But the hands of my country knit reeds, bend wood,
Shape out the pliable parts of boats and roofs.
Mend pots, paint pictures, write books
Though different books: glean harvests, if different harvests,
Not so green as young rice first shaking its spears from water.
Hands cannot say. Feet then? They say
In shoe, not sandal, or bare, if a man be poor,
They thread the long ways between daylight and dark,
Longer, from birth to death,
Know flint from grasses, wear soles through, hate sharp pebbles,
Often times long for the lightness of birds.
Yet in my country, children, even the poor
Wear soft warm shoes, and a little foot in the dance
Warms the looks of young men, no less than here.
In my country, on summer evenings, clean as milk poured out
From old blue basins, children under the hawthorn trees
Fly kites, lacing thin strings against the sky.
Not at New Year, but at other festivals
We light up fire-crackers
In memory of old buried danger, now a ghost danger.
Coming to your land, I saw little boys spin tops.
The girls marked patterns in chalks about your street –
This game I might have told them at five years old.
A man sold peanuts, another warmed hands at his brazier,
A smiling mother suckled the first-born at her breast.
On a roof-garden, among the red-twigged delicate bowing of winter trees,
The small grave bowls of dwarf pines (our pines grow tall,
Yet the needle-sharp hair is the same,) one first star swam,
Silver in lily-root dusk. Two lovers looked up.
Hands, body, heart in my breast,
Whispered, ‘These are the same. Here we are not so strange —
Here there are friends and peace.
We have known such ways, we in our country!’
Black-tiled roofs, curled like wide horns, and hiding safe
From the eyes of the stranger, all that puts faith in you.
Remember this, of an unknown woman who passed,
But who stood first, high on the darkening roof-garden, looking down.
My way behind me tattered away in wind,
Before me, was spelt with strange letters.
My mind was a gourd heavy with sweet and bitter waters.
Since I could not be that young girl, who heedless of stars
Now watched the face of her lover,
I wished to be, for one day, a man selling mandarins,
A blackened tile in some hearth-place; a brazier, a well, a good word,
A blackened corpse along the road to Chapei,
Of a brave man, dead for his country.
Shaking the sweet-bitter waters within my mind,
It seemed to me, all seas fuse and intermarry.
Under the seas, all lands knit fibre, interlock:
On a highway so ancient as China’s
What are a few miles more, to the ends of earth?
Is another lantern too heavy, to light up, showing the face
Of farers and wayfarers, stumbling the while they go,
Since the world has called them stranger?
Only two rebels cried out ‘We do not understand.’
Ear said, ‘China and we
Struck two far sides of a rock: music came forth,
Our music and theirs, not the one music.
Listening in street and stall, I hear two words,
Their word and mine. Mine is not understood,
Therefore am I an exile here, a stranger,
Eaten up with hunger for what I understand,
And for that which understand[s me].’
Tongue said, ‘I know
The sweet flavours of mandarin or fish. But mouth and I,
Speaking here, are mocked. Looks fall on us like blows.
Mistress, we serve you well, and not for cash,
But free men. Therefore, beseech you, let us go on.’
Heart lowlier said ‘There is a way of patience —
Let ear study the way door to understanding.
Mouth, there is silence first, but fellowship
Where children laugh or weep, the grown smile or frown.
Study, perceive and learn. Let not two parts
Unwisely make an exile of the whole.’
But still the rebels bawled, and so I saw
How in a world divorced from silences
These are the thieves.
Ear, who no longer listening well, sniffs up
The first vain trash, the first argument into his sack.
Mouth, who will spew it forth, but to be heard —
Both ill-taught scholars, credulous liars,
Seizing on, flinging up fuel.
Their flame the restlessness of such sick worlds,
As cannot know their country, or earth’s country;
Their moment, or an age’s moment.
Having such brawling servants in my train
I can be neither tile nor lamp.
Only a footprint. Some boy sees it at dawn
Before his tilted cart wheels over it;
Only a sped and broken arrow,
Pointing a way where men will come in peace --
_______
Yet in my country (in your country
Brown women’s hands are deft in weaving grassy houses,
Boys fish, willows watch their blowing tresses in stream,
Good, against evil, sets a young wrestler’s foot,
Praying for strength from his hills.
No more I say, but that once
My father brought home an old flute.
Very small was our house: but twisting poppies run wild
In our hair, my three sisters and I
Danced that night like three sources of corn.
_______
East Side
In the deserted village, sunken down
With a shrug of last weak old age, after the shells
All people are fled, or killed. Not one mild house
So much as a sparrow hears on earthen floor,
Walls stand, but cannot live without the folk they loved --
It will be a bad thing to wake them.
Having smashed the rice-bowl, do not fill it again.
The village temple, well-built, with five smashed gods, ten whole ones
Does not want prayers. Its last vain prayer bled up
When the women ran outside, to be slain.
A temple must house its sparrows, or fall asleep,
Therefore a long time, under his crown of snails,
The gilded Buddha demands to meditate.
No little flowering fires on the incense-strings
Startle Kwan-Yin, whom they dressed in satin —
Old women sewing beads like pearls in her hair.
This was a temple for the very poor ones --
Their gods were mud and lathe: but artfully,
Wistfully, in the well-appointed colours
Some broken artist painted them all,
Wooden dragons are carefully carved.
Finding in mangled wood one smiling, childish tree,
Roses and bells, not one foot high,
I put it back at the feet of Kwan-Yin.
Showing mercy one mercy.
A woman’s prayer-bag,
Having within her paper prayer, paid for in cash
(Perhaps for a fighting son,
Perhaps for the little son who sought not her womb,
This I took, seeing it torn.
No prayer can I answer, or understand –
What prayers were answered, those last red nights?
Carrying her bag around the course of the world.
I shall often think ‘My sister I did not see
Voiced here a dying wish.
But the gods dreamed on. So low her words, so loud
The guns, all that death-night, none could stoop to hear.[‘]
_______
Earth says, ‘Liang, my young darling,
Thirteen times has had his gift at New Year.
At seven he was busy, clinging astride the old thick-hided buffalo,
Switching off flies with his branch,
Staring down into rice-field water.
The fish his line tugged out of the river
Though little very he carefully bore to his mother,
In a reed tray covered with leaves.
Later, when long drought sucked at the apricot trees,
And stones in the creek beds gaped like fish
It was he who searched best, finding water.
When winter cracked, when summer chafed my sore clay sides,
Always Liang was busy . . .
DC Coll ms. Composed February-March 1938, incorporating record of Hyde’s experiences in Hong Kong and occupied Shanghai. The 5-page ms, unsigned and untitled, includes the draft ‘East Side’ (4) published in Houses as ‘The Deserted Village’ (144). The ms generated several other poems, notably sections of ‘Fragments From Two Countries’ (Houses 135). An incomplete draft of ‘The Water-Bearer’ (Houses 138) occurs on p. 5. Rawlinson edited freely from pp. 1-5 to derive the poem published in Houses as ‘What is it makes the stranger?’ (141).
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