New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry

Another poem from the same collection that crystallizes the tragedy
of modern China and the tragic sense of history, while written on a tra-
ditional theme, is “Mailing a Pair of Shoes”ab, a poem that depicts
a gift from one lover to another, separated during the long cold war:

From a thousand miles away
I’m mailing you a pair of cotton shoes
A letter
With no words
Containing more than forty years
of things to say
Things only thought but never said
One sentence after another
Closely stitched into the soles

What I have to say I’ve kept hidden
for so long
Some of it hidden by the well
Some of it hidden in the kitchen
Some of it hidden under my pillow
Some of it hidden in the flickering
lamp at midnight
Some of it has been dried by the wind
Some of it has grown moldy
Some of it has lost its teeth
Some of it has grown moss
Now I gather it all together
And stitch it closely into the soles

The shoes may be too small
I measured them with my heart,
with our childhood
With dreams from deep in the night
Whether they fit or not is another
matter
Please, never throw them away
As if they were worn-out shoes
Forty years of thought
Forty years of blood and tears
Forty years of loneliness
Are all stitched into the soles
(Luo 1990: 159–160)

Luo Fu’s most recent collection titled Driftwoodc木is actually a
240-page poem. In a sense the poet has come full circle from Death of
a Stone Cell, the antiepic of his youth, to Driftwood, the epic summation

80 John Balcom

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