The Black BoxA Poem by David Lewis PagetThe truck pulled up at the crack of dawn On a Sunday morn in June, I could hear the men unloading from The darkness of my room, ‘What a strange time to deliver,’ I thought, As I rose, pulled on my socks, For there on the porch outside I found They’d left a big black box.
There wasn’t a mark on this gleaming box But the scrawl of my own address, Nothing to say who it was from Just a silent emptiness, I left it there til the sun came up Then I pulled it through the door, And there in a tiny script was writ The legend, ‘from Zhongguo’. *
Why would the Chinese send a box, I hadn’t been there for years, Maybe the Tong I’d tangled with Back then, for black was a curse. I looked for a way to open it But there wasn’t a flap or seam, It wasn’t tin and it wasn’t steel But a substance in-between.
I dragged it out in the garden then, Outside of the door, at back, And thought that I would figure it out, Then the box began to crack. It heated up in the morning sun And began to peel away, Opening up the inside to Be seen by the light of day.
And there inside was a giant egg, The biggest I’d ever seen, All sorts of curious markings on The shell, in Mandarin. I went inside and I locked the door And I sat myself to think, Why would they send a giant egg? My mind was on the blink!
It only took a couple of hours In the sun, that day in June, And the shell began to break apart, To hatch in the afternoon, And a thing crawled out of that empty shell That I never thought I’d see, A tiny Chinese Dragon hatched Came out, was suddenly free!
I couldn’t believe how fast it grew As it fluttered out its wings, It ate the cat and my bowler hat And a host of other things, Then it wandered down to the goldfish pool Slid in, and began to swim, There isn’t a single goldfish left And the pool is sizzling.
Its head comes up and it gives a roar And it sets the reeds on fire, The flame is almost ten feet long And my future’s looking dire. Will someone get in touch with the zoo They can have the beast for free, Oh no! It’s wandering up the path, No doubt, it’s looking for me!
David Lewis Paget
*Zhongguo - pron. Jong gwar - China © 2015 David Lewis PagetFeatured Review
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