CHINESE NEW YEAR

Chinese New Year

always comes in February.

(Usually.)

This is the last

of the twelve year cycle;

the Year of the Pig.

Processions, dragon dances,

fireworks and smoke,

cymbals and drums.

The Chinese close their shops,

do not sweep their houses

and pay respect

to the Ancestors.

They put a spray

of cream and purple orchids

on car radiators.

They put peacock-eye feathers

in the Spirit House of Chao Ti.

This year

a thin woman

hung up her baby

by its left ankle.

She let it bob and scream

as an entertainment.

A silver coloured bowl

collected offerings.

The string broke.

Someone caught the baby.

Muslims exploded bombs,

killed an army major,

burned Buddhist schools.

Someone stole our telephone wire.

(Copper is making a hundred baht a kilo.)

LOTUS POND MARKET

Looking neither left nor right,

a proud and sensitive Chinese face,

here by the Lotus Pond Market,

seems a little out of place.

Straight back, head held high,

adjusts her hair with manicured hand;

red panung, blue-and-white print shirt,

manouvres with care her sandalled feet,

as though she has stepped down from a higher band

into the squalor and dirt

of Chumporn Street.

But, as she passes the open shop,

something makes her stop

and look up where

she sees the fat Chinese,

above the street, at her table there.

The Chinese gestures, the girl hesitates,

thinks to walk on, stands and waits;

then steps up with an embarrassed smile

and sits down in the other chair.

The Chinese gives her a deck of cards,

talking all the while,

which the girl shuffles with surprising skill

and hands them back.

Without looking, the Chinese cuts the pack

and deals them professionally,

mostly to herself, occasionally

one or two to the girl, who looks carefully

at the cards she collects.

The Chinese gathers up her hand,

fans them face down

and invites the girl to select.

Hesitating, she takes two

and adds them to her own.

She watches the Chinese who

touches the girl’s cards, talking in a monotone

suddenly broken by a sharp question.

The girl raises her eyes in surprise

and starts to reply,

stops, looks down again

and pronounces one word.

Slowly, she begins to speak.

An eddy of excitement

spirals up and straightens her back.

She points to this card and that

and taps them with delight.

She slaps her knee.

She bangs the table.

She stamps her feet,

bounces up and down on her chair,

laughing and flushed.

The Chinese watches her

with a slowly flowering smile.

The girl chatters on

and, with a final slap,

puts her head back and laughs.

Then she counts out thirty baht

for the Chinese, scrapes her chair

and walks on down Chumporn Street,

looking neither left nor right.

CONFUSCIUS HE SAY...

You see them striding everywhere
from where there’s here to somewhere there

with a box made of two shallow trays

which open out like a folding table,

like those in which a lepidopterist displays

dead butterflies each pinned down with its label.

The old Chinese has sat all day long

on that low wall in Surawong

with his box, staring intently

at the lottery tickets laid out neatly.

He takes a 1000 baht note from his pocket

and touches each ticket

stroking it thoroughly but gently.

Is he trying to magnetise them

to draw in a man who comes and (sometimes) buys them?

FOOTPRINTS ON THE MOON

Blue shorts, stained white shirt,

street market playground of dust and dirt.
Without the moral imperative of must

and the enforced need to understand,

he dances in a circle,

holding a yellowed bodhi leaf in each hand.

With all the self-assurance of thirty inches high,

he has no need to wonder how or when or why.

From 'Bamboo Leaves' by Brian Taylor