Zeeba Ansari
Fu Hao Considers the Morning
Three thousand years from here
Fu Hao considers the morning.
Her cricket-strung fields are singing:
sun is her head-note, moon is her spirit;
the two form a cross she will never set down.
*
Light is a peacemaker, returning to perfection
the million drops of sand shaken
from the muzzles of mountains
bending their heads to the White Jade River
where silk roads find reflection.
*
Darkness is fluent in words of the earth
silencing songs of armies
sending their fire through the clay of the world;
the singing stops, becomes time pressed
in the shape of a carving
cold in the hand of a queen.
*
Fu Hao considers the flowers of the world –
their heads of jade, their heart-stones
close as night lays love-stones on her skin:
sun rises; light is her monument, the last thing.
Fu Hao (d. circa 1200BC): one of the wives of King
Wu Ding of the Shang dynasty; unusually for the time,
she was also a (highly successful) military general.
Her tomb contained over 750 jade artefacts.
Poems for this issue were selected by Penelope Shuttle
Page(s) 39
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