The Feast

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Title:     The Feast
Author: Eunice Tietjens [More Titles by Tietjens]

So this is the wedding feast!
The room is not large, but it is heavily crowded, filled
    with small tables, filled with many human bodies.
About the walls are paintings and banners in sharp
    colors; above our heads hang innumerable gaudy
    lanterns of wood and paper. We sit in furs,
    shivering with the cold.
The food passes endlessly, droll combinations in brown
    gravies--roses, sugar, and lard--duck and
    bamboo--lotus, chestnuts, and fish-eggs--an
    "eight-precious pudding."
They tempt curiosity; my chop-sticks are busy. The
    warm rice-wine trickles sparingly.
The groom is invisible somewhere, but the bride
    martyrs among us. She is clad in scarlet satin,
    heavily embroidered with gold. On her head is
    an edifice of scarlet and pearls.
For weeks, I know, she has wept in protest.
The feast-mother leads her in to us with sacrificial
    rites. Her eyes are closed, hidden behind her
    curtain of strung beads; for three days she will
    not open them. She has never seen the bridegroom.
At the feast she sits like her own effigy. She neither
    eats nor speaks.
Opposite her, across the narrow table, is a wall of
    curious faces, lookers-on--children and half-grown
    boys, beggars and what-not--the gleanings
    of the streets.
They are quiet but they watch hungrily.
To-night, when the bridegroom draws the scarlet curtains
    of the bed, they will still be watching
    hungrily....
Strange, formless memories out of books struggle upward
    in my consciousness. This is the marriage
    at Cana.... I am feasting with the Caliph
    at Bagdad.... I am the wedding guest who
    beat his breast....
My heart is troubled.
What shall be said of blood-brotherhood between man
    and man?
  Wusih

[The end]
Eunice Tietjens's poem: Feast

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