The Jidimajia Arcane
by Jack Hirschman
1.
You and I were fated
to be comrades for life,
Jidimajia.
Even before we met
for your 5th Qinghai Lake
International
Poetry Festival
in Xining and you visited
Aggie’s and my room
with Jami Proctor-Xu
and bottles of baijiu. In fact
30 years ago
when you were a young
man and I was
translating Albanian
poetry and found
I loved best of all the word
Xhuxhimaxhuxha,
I realize now
I was rhythmically destined
to meet you as
not only the Chairman
of the All China Writers
Union, but the major
poet of one of
the 56 minorities
in China, the Yi
people, — you, of
the Nuosu “black” strain in
that tribe, no doubt why
you could pen such a
magnificent ode to Nelson
Mandela and
receive the torrential
applause of the Yellow,
Yangtze, and Lancang
Rivers that Qinghai is the
birthplace of, under fireworks
of bursting buckwheat,
as we spoke of how
I was a kabbalist Jew,
and you might be one too,
and this said with heart
and humor as Jami
translated us from
me to you and you to me,
we laughing all the way to
the bottoms of our glasses.
2.
And so you had me sit
next to you at all the meals,
the American communist,
and I toasted, toasted
with one Chinese poet or
prefecture after another,
and we toasted each other
with those tiny, delicate jiggers
of Moutai baijiu
and that slowly spinning
table flooded with dishes
of all tasty sorts,
and the next day bussed
to Qinghai Lake and there
— if I’d not already
sensed it — we realized
what a great international
revolutionary you are
by seeing the wall that’s
even Greater than the Great Wall,
the Wall of poets
with images of Pablo Neruda,
Langston Hughes, Cesar Valleo,
Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs,
Walt Whitman, Du Fu,
Mahmoud Darwish, Guo
Muruo, William Blake
Yongyuan, richu,
riluo, xiantian qiutian
dongtian chuntian!
Forever, sunrise
sunset, summer autumn
winter spring!
And rectangularly
from the Wall out over a
field of grass, 24
hugh statues of figures
in the epic poems of the world,
from Gilgamesh, to the Song
of Roland, to Beowulf,
to the Kalevala of Fin
and,
and the epic of Armenia
in what is without doubt
the greatest homage to the art
of poetry in the world.
3.
My chubby brilliant
friend, you who said, “Robots
don’t bloom,” and that
poetry “has become
an affirmation of the
deeply held human
longing to return
to where we came from . . . to our
spiritual Garden of Eden”
certainly with poems
and brilliant essays Festivals
and other projects
have done enough to
earn a Nobel Prize for the
nobility of poetry
as the innate language
of the people of the earth
in its song of raising
the banner of human
Kindness and Beauty over
all and every one
of the more than thirty
countries that China graced with
unforgettable welcome,
with avalanches
of books, red cashmere scarves
and the colorful
costumes of the Yi
into whose minority
of eight million
souls we all were
admitted as honorary
members for life.
Bravo! I shout, who
taught you that word
that now, at the end
of every performance,
you shout out, Bravo!
with glee galore;
and, as always with China,
there wants to be, unendingly,
more. More. MORE!