Culture Clash

Beside the uniquely hideous GLC building

On a nasty September day

With a chill in the air and rain just starting to spit,

The Japanese couple, only this minute married,

Have come to be photographed,

The Thames in the background looking as deadly dull

As ditchwater by Dickens. Bill Sykes

Was lucky to get himself hanged

Half a mile downriver from here.

When the sun goes in, it makes falling out of a window

Seem like the thing to do. But just look

At the bride. No, not at the groom, whose suit

Would be a black-tie outfit if not in white

With trimmings a duck-egg blue, the shirt all frills

Like Tommy Steele playing Liberace’s houseboy.

I mean look at her. Inside that three-tier cake

Of a dress is a model for Utamaro.

Do they have another ceremony at home

With all the traditional rigour?

And is it a gaijin flaunting his arrogance

To wish her lifted out of this concrete mess

And taken home by JAL to the rooms of paper,

The laths of wood and the properly arranged flowers,

With kimono and her hair pinned up to frame

The fresh snow of her beauty?

Look at the line of her cheek as once the painter

Would have looked at it in the Floating World

When he spoke to her with the reverence of a duke

To the Lady Murasaki.

Ah, Butterfly, you have failed to understand.

You must not come to us. We must come to you.

-- Standpoint, December 2010