Lawrence Hall, HSG
[email protected]
I Had a Flat Tire Along the Silk Road
A bandit-princess stole my trail-lost heart
To play with carelessly one idle day
She teased me a road sketched on her magic chart
But I had a flat tire along the way
Sep 14, 2024
Sep 14, 2024 at 12:16 PM UTC
Lawrence Hall, HSG
[email protected]
I Had a Flat Tire Along the Silk Road
A bandit-princess stole my trail-lost heart
To play with carelessly one idle day
She teased me a road sketched on her magic chart
But I had a flat tire along the way
I generally disapprove of exposition; the poem should do its job. I must make an exception here. From reading ** Chi Minh (a wicked man, but even as I enjoy the poems of Edmund Spenser, a genocidal maniac, so it is with a more recent mass murderer - do read up on kindly Uncle Ho's consolidation of power in North Viet-Nam in the 1950s) and Li Po (variant pronunciations and spellings in English) and trying to understand Tang quatrains, well, I don’t understand much. The forms and content are so varied as to make the term almost undefinable to my simple English soul. But nature, irony, loss, and separation are apparently common, as well as rhyme, so I took them and iambic pentameter for this unworthy scribble. This is not an appropriation but rather an humble homage to a Chinese tradition.