In three white terraces the circle lies, piled one on
    one toward Heaven.  And on each terrace the
    white balustrade climbs in aspiring marble, etched
    in cloud. 
And Heaven is very near. 
For this is worship native as the air, wide as the
    wind, and poignant as the rain,
Pure aspiration, the eternal dream.

Beneath the leaning sky this great white circle!

  Peking

The Chair Ride

The coolies lift and strain;
My chair creaks rhythmically. 
It is not yet morning and the live darkness pushes
    about us, a greedy darkness that has swallowed
    even the stars. 
In all the world there is left only my chair, with the
    tiny horn lantern before it. 
There are also, it is true, the undersides of trees in
    the lantern-light and the stony path that flows
    past ceaselessly. 
But these things flit and change. 
Only I and the chair and the darkness are permanent. 
    We have been moving so since time was in the
    womb.

The seat of my chair is of wicker. 
It is not unlike an invalid chair, and I, in it, am swaddled
    like an invalid, wrapped in layer on layer
    of coddling wool. 
But there are no wheels to my chair.  I ride on the
    steady feet of four queued coolies. 
The tramp of their lifted shoes is the rhythm of being,
    throbbing in me as my own heart throbs.

Save for their feet the bearers are silent.  They move
    softly through the live darkness.  But now and
    again I am shifted skilfully from one shoulder to
    the other.

The breath of the coolies is short. 
They strain, and in spite of the cold I know they are
    sweating. 
It is wicked of course! 
My five dollars ought not to buy life. 
But it is all they understand;
And even I am not precisely comfortable.

The darkness is thinning a little. 
On either side loom featureless black hills, their summits
    sharp and ragged. 
The Great Wall is somewhere hereabouts.

My chair creaks rhythmically. 
In another year it will be day.

  Ching-lung-chiao

The Sikh Policeman:  A British Subject

Of what, I wonder, are you thinking? 
It is something beyond my world I know, something
    that I cannot guess. 
Yet I wonder.

Of nothing Chinese can you be thinking, for you hate
    them with an automatic hatred—­the hatred of
    the well-fed for the starved, of the warlike for
    the weak. 
When they cross you, you kick them, viciously, with
    the drawing back of your silken beard, your
    black, black beard, from your white teeth. 
With a snarl you kick them, sputtering curses in short
    gutturals. 
You do not even speak their tongue, so it cannot be
    of them you are thinking.