On Seeing a Chinese Student

Perform the Peacock Dance of the Dai People at an International Cultural Festival in the United States of America

When pleasure is greatest, sorrow follows.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX— Tu Fu

On seeing her perform I thought:
So this is why god made women!
Why men who don’t know how to be men
Want to but can never be them;
Why we, unsexed, are being replaced
By hybrid beings, half human,
Half digital, the fusion of
Our yin and yang humanity.

And though few of us are dancers
Yet, out of the human animal,
All mankind danced as we emerged
Into something irreducible
To the products of our labour
Dug up by archaeologists,
Or capacity for cruelty
Measured by neuroscientists.

For I was seeing the beauty
Only women can embody!
And not in their wombs but from this
Is born our spirituality:
The beauty of the feminine,
The petals in the flower,
Plucked and worn, though both will fade
In the wilting of their hour.

And compared to this all jewels
Are glass, all gold is alchemy;
And fame the flattery of fools,
Rhymed verse devoid of poetry.
But isn’t this my way to say
I have found no words to describe
The beauty of she who performed
The peacock dance of the Dai?

The crescent moon of her smile
In the penumbra of her face.
The raven’s wing of her hair
Eclipsing her forehead’s grace.
The flight of her feathered fingers
Across the dancefloor of the sky.
The bamboo of her body bent
With the weight of my desire.

But these, like all words, separate
The totality of beauty:
Splinters of light, shadows of time
In the fragments of my memory.
And I grow old as I grew young,
Filled with lust but empty of guile
To turn my words to living flesh,
Make my still feet dance awhile.

And though, one day, this student may
Learn to dance with more precision,
Her movements smoother, each gesture
Refined by age’s repetition;
Never will she be more beautiful,
Her face radiate more light,
Her pleasure be more innocent
And less sorrowful my delight.

Between the laughter of the sun
And the old moon’s silent weeping,
The young goddess of the day
Revels in her fleeting beauty.
And bestows this blessing on me,
Witness to her divinity,
While around her digital eyes
Record what they cannot see.

— Hong Kong, October 2024

• • • • •

The epigraph is from a poem by the T’ang Dynasty Chinese poet, Tu Fu, ‘On Seeing a Pupil of Kun-sun Dance the Chien-ch’i — A Ballad’, written in 717, when he was fifty-five years old, in remembrance of seeing the famous dancer, Kun-sun, fifty years before.
XXX‘And compared to this all jewels / Are glass, all gold is alchemy’ is a reference to John Donne’s The Sun Rising (1633).
XXXMy own poem was inspired by the footage of a Chinese graduate student performing the Peacock Dance of the Dai ethnic group of Yunnan at an international cultural festival held at Michigan State University, USA, in September 2024, to an audience of Americans staring at their smartphones.