These paper boats of mine are meant to dance on the ripples of hours, and not reach any destination... Rabindranath Tagore

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past...F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.
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On the way to the river are the old dormitories, used for something else now, with their fairy-tale turrets, painted white and gold and blue. When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
--from Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.
- Joyce Carol Oates
Showing posts with label beautiful sadness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label beautiful sadness. Show all posts

Sunday, August 12, 2012

The Red Piano


The Red Piano (2008) - Andre LeBlanc
NOTE: This is based on a true story.
Andre interviewed Zhu Xiao-Mei in April 2007.
She is now a virtuoso pianist.


A camp
Lost between
Inner Mongolia
And China

Music
Playing music
Secretly
The only way to keep a child's senses
Untangled
Unbarbed

Just wired

She secures the notes on
Fragile
Re-used
Paper

Transportable testimony of
Hope

Someday
Far away
She will erase
Five years of
Invisibility
Exile

And play the music of

Freedom...

Someday...

So far away....


PREVIOUS POSTS ON THE RED PIANO
The Red Piano Quotes
The Red Piano Begins



GOODREADS REVIEW

The Red PianoThe Red Piano by André LeBlanc
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Manual labour for children during China's Cultural Revolution was a time of abyssmal darkness for creativity. Just how dark and negative that time could be is demonstrated by The Red Piano. Unless of course, that child is Zhu Xiao-Mei, longing to find her voice playing the piano. Quietly she rebelled, determined to let her music be heard. How she rebelled evolves into a mesmerising, humbling story.

My poetic review is on my Songlines on the Winds blog.

View all my reviews


Linking to:
dVerse ~ Poetics ~ Beautiful Sadness
Poetry Pantry ~ Poets United
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