Impulse, instinct, memory or my will
Flexes the muscle that contracts the tendon
That pulls together two bones in my skeleton:
And so I move, slowly, out of this space
Into another. And as if risen
From ashen death, faces whitened, heads shaven,
Lipstick of blood at the corners of their eyes,
Clothed in the garments in which they were buried,
Movements hesitant, slow, then deliberate,
They open closed eyelids, raise withered limbs,
To become, like snakes uncurling from their skins,
Immortals of the modern mythology —
More human than we also humans. While we,
Sat in the darkness uncomfortably,
Cross-legged, arms folded into jackets,
Spines curved like a knife between shoulder blades,
Pelvises tilted, first backward, then forward,
Motionless for hours, awkward and in pain,
Longing for it to end, unable to look away,
Hiding behind our smartphone screens, watch
Like dummies in the window of a shop.
Mere mortals in this deathless theatre,
Will we ever learn the dance of darkness
That would finally raise us from the dead?
— Hong Kong, January 2025
• • • • •
In January 2025, we attended ‘Butoh in Six Acts’, a festival of the Japanese dance form (ankoku butō means ‘dance of darkness’) held over three nights, incongruously, in the basement of Sotheby’s Maison, the auction house of the multinational arts broker in Hong Kong. My poem is primarily a response to the second act, ‘Stars above in the well below, high noon’, by Masami Yurabe and Miwako Inagaki. What no recording can capture is the transmutation the dancers underwent in the course of their dance. They were not performing; they were being differently, and appeared to enter into something like a trance-like state in which, purged of the impurities of personality, the essence of what it is to be human was distilled before us.
A Communist in Hong Kong 