Song Book of Quong Lee of Limehouse | Page 4

torn it through,?So that it shows ten thousand gaping rents?Where the light comes in.
A Smile Given In Passing
As I walked the street in the purring evening?A little maid with yellow curls?Tossed me a smile; and suddenly Pennyfields?Grew from darkness to light, and the light of the stars?Grew pale.
I may not see her again, but I hold her smile in my heart, And she is with me in my shop and about the streets.?My shop may tumble down;?West India Dock may some time suffer a drought;?Grief and Joy come for a day;?And Hope and Fear, and Desire and Deed?Arise and pass, and are no more;?But the beauty born of her quickened smile?Can never die.
Of a National Cash Register
Last week this person, desiring to make it known?That he was in all ways moving up to the date,?Introduced into his insignificant shop?A machine-that-counts,?Called a National Cash Register,?Which announces to refined and intelligent customers?The amounts of their purchases.
This week this person purchased a whole days' amusement;?And the amount he paid for this was another's discomfiture and pain. And, after a night of cogitation,?He is moved to reflect on the far-reaching and wholesome value Of a National Register which would announce to the face?The cost of such pleasures as this.
Under a Shining Window
A lamplit window,?At the top of a tenement house near Poplar High Street,?Shines fluently out of the night;?And looking upward I see?That the bricks of the houses are bright and fair to the eye.
There are no flowers in West India Dock Road;?Nothing but brick and stone, and iron and spent air.?But when rough brick and stone are a shrine for beauty,?They become themselves beautiful.?Perhaps if this person encloses within himself?Beautiful thoughts and amiable intentions,?His insignificant frame may acquire?The noble outlines of that tenement house.
Exchange of Compliments
At ten o'clock last night an ugly fellow,?Of skinny exterior and most ungracious manner,?Was thrown with a total loss of gravity?>From the flapping doors of the Blue Lantern.
He lurched in most ungainly fashion past this person's shop-- This person standing at his door--?And used base language of an unpolished nature,?Calling him Ugly Yellow Bastard,?Hop Fiend and Dirty Doper,?Eater of Dogs and Cheater at Puckapoo,?Son-of-a-Bitch and devotee of vice.
This person did not respond in like manner,?Knowing that he is not himself all-perfect,?Nor even in every hour?A devout follower of the teachings of the Four Books.?He contented himself with repeating in a far-reaching tone, The words of the lofty Lao Tzu:?When pot upon stove reproveth kettle for blackness,?Pot speaking out of turn.
A Song of Little Girls
I want to make a song of the little girls?That live about this quarter.?I could make a song of boys quite easily with words,?But words are too blunt for such delicate things as girls.?I would like to make my song of them with bees and butterflies. One looks at the boy, and says Boy;?And lo, one has described him.?But little girls are morning light and melody;?Their happy hair flutters and flies, or curtains their laughing faces-- Faces glad as the sun at dawn.?Their clear, cool skin is like wine to the eyes,?The lines of their fluent limbs run like a song,?And every step is a note of grace which the frock repeats.
Don't you think it a pity, and greatly to be deplored?That these should lose this beauty,?And pass from it to the guile and trickery of woman?
Of Shop Windows
Looking closely at the glass windows of my shop,?I see in them the whole of my shop reflected.?Looking at my windows closely from the street,?I see in them the life of the street reflected.?Yet if I stand away, the glass remains transparent,?And I see clearly through it to the things beyond.
If I look with close vision?Into the hearts of men,?I see my own small heart reflected.?I will try henceforth not to look at them too closely.
At the Feast of Lanterns
Lithely on their strings swing the many-coloured lanterns,?For this is the Feast of Lanterns;?And Pennyfields and West India Dock Road?Are to-night a part of my own country,?Aglow with the hues of the Peacock's Tail,?Very amiable to the eye.
In a recess of my heart?Is a poor street hung with lanterns.?These lanterns are my thoughts,?And they are lighted at the last hours of the evenings,?When through this street?Walks the willowy maiden from the tea-shop across the road.
One Service Breeds Another
One of this person's white-skinned friends, Bill Hawkins,?Who labours at the waterside,?Had occasion, at the time of unkind weather,?To rescue from the certain peril of drowning?One who had slipped from the edge of a wharf to the dock.
Without reward the flower serves the bee.?The mother serves the child with pain and toil.?The soldier serves his king without king's gratitutde.?And this person has noted with much private amusement,?How, since this one service rendered,?Bill Hawkins goes ever from his accustomed path?To add service to service to the one he rescued;?While the rescued one