This is an elegiac poem dedicated to the late Mr Fou Ts’ong, a renowned Chinese pianist who had been living in exile in the UK since the Cultural Revolution in China. The piece was composed as a reflection on his life and artistic practice three months after he passed away due to Covid-19.
When One Lid Closes Another Opens
Every time you played,
murmurs rumbled
from your petrified horse.
Some muffled Tuvan songs
in undertone.
You carried in your luggage
not only that voice,
but blood-stained debris
from a place that
kept falling apart,
because of which
when they admired caged
crystal flowers you sent
hooded men and women
riding on volcanoes.
At ‘home’, if so decreed,
the twin colours of keys
could flip.
What nurtured you
crushed you, from start to end.
Here, only blackness mirrors.
Between your instrument
and dilating pupils
millions of mouths chanted.
That very voice, in ‘our tongue’.
Perhaps this is a cursed tongue.
All your life you saw
a circle close.
Now that you left us,
it starts over.
In memory of Fou Ts’ong (1934-2020)