Rob Schackne #549 - Three Walls (redux)

Three Walls                          

                                   for Yang Lei, 1982 

Because when I was much younger
I imagined a warmer home for us all, 
A haphazard collection of good uses,
Our next tradition, a different love.

About the same time Comrade Lei Feng
Becomes immortal watching his old mother,
Famous for three walls, no candles, no roof,
The rain, cold winters, a long history of bugs.

Proletarian dreams...a country girl
1980s slowly kicking home from school.
Why didn’t Comrade Feng try the temples
For sounder sleep, regular meals, a job for life?

The day Mao admires a common soldier
Propaganda’s tale becomes the Truth.
The spiders get busy spinning Revolution.
Four walls, cold water, dirt floor, mud roof.

Wherever He went, we would follow Him.
Forty years of Slogan to ensure momentum.
They said the People’s Will was everything.
(In the museum we saw the ropes they used.)

Like any hunger does, tomorrow came at night
Selling beef and chicken, rice and oil futures,
Cement floor, shower, low interest, electric light,
The dizzy architectures of our glorious comrades.

For all I have of this life today, one good turn
Away from the past and all that dereliction,
I still dream of whatever it was that was coming,
Mostly of beehives and hybrid strains of pollen.


                                     China, 2002-2017