River of Stars. Guy Gavriel Kay

have been born?

       In the rainy season we lose the stars.

       We do not lose friendship and loyalty,

       Good talk, courtesy, the virtues of this time

       As they are of any age ever in Kitai.

       I think of friends far away and my heart aches.

       I drink wine with new companions.

       They have opened their gate to a stranger.

       Kindness is a brightly feathered bird on a branch.

       We listen to their bell as it rings.

       We drink and they refill our wine cups.

       I will count myself honoured and blessed

       Whatever becomes of my last days.

      He had written that in springtime on their wall, running hand, large letters, the wide brush quick. The poem emerging as if discovering itself. He was known for improvising in this way. It would seldom be one’s best writing but would have a different kind of value, created right there, in the moment, as the black ink defined the wall.

      They had been very happy, the clerics, entering the room after he was done, seeing his words. It would help them a great deal, once it became known that a poem by Lu Chen was on a wall in Lingzhou Isle.

      He did this for friends, he did it for joy. He’d lived poetry all his life: carefully revised or swiftly improvised, drunken or sober, dark night, moonlight, morning mist, from the heart of power or protesting against it, or exiled, finally, here.

      The clerics had stared at the wall, the words. They had touched his hands, bowing over and over. Two of them had wept. He had suggested drinking in celebration. Said he very much wanted wine, which was only truth. One of them had gone across the village and come back with Lu Mah.