China Blue
I had seen him in the market,
I had glimpsed him in the rain,
I had tried to pick his trail up
On the Wenzhou-Hangzhou train,
Then he'd seen me drinking Kafei
In a little Shanghai Ba,
And had run the length of Nanjing Road
And fled in a jiao che.
He was Sun Peng Fei, her brother,
She was Sun Ye Ling, I knew,
But I'd always caught her smiling
When I called her China Blue,
She was sweet, and very pretty,
And I'd fallen for her, hard,
In the village school at Ping Yang
When I saw her in the yard.
We had taken to each other
And I'd tried to learn Chinese,
But she warned me of her brother,
He was grim, and hard to please,
And her parents had been angry
When they heard of me one day,
They had told her older brother
‘She'll not marry a yang wei! '
At the end of the semester
China Blue had disappeared,
And I asked the Zhongwen lao shi
If it was as I had feared,
She'd been taken by her parents
And her brother to Shanghai,
Thinking I could never find her,
But I knew I'd have to try.
A needle in a haystack
Would be easier than this,
There are twenty million people
In this huge metropolis,
But I knew that I would see them
If I watched the Nanjing Road,
In that swarm of Christmas shoppers
I stayed put, and watched the crowd,
A week before that Christmas
I could see them, in a queue,
Lining up for western presents,
Mother, father, China Blue,
Then I tapped her on the shoulder
[...] Read more
poem by David Lewis Paget
Added by Poetry Lover
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