There’s a corner. Bricked walled businesses abut a cobblestone laneway, Yes, a cobblestone laneway, right in the centre of Melbourne; Melbourne Australia.
I’d get y’all a pic, but with wuhan virus travel restraints, google’s gonna have to do.
The restaurant’s closed now. Its last incarnation the ‘Crane Restaurant.’
Kun Ming opened in 1928, on the corner of Celestial Avenue and Little Bourke St. the heart of Melbourne’s Chinatown.
Dad, David Cheong Sing, cooked at Kun Ming as a bachelor. His future wife Annie lodged in Celestial Avenue, working as a milliner in the rag trade ghetto bounded by Latrobe, Lonsdale and Russell Streets. All that’s left of those tumble down cottages is the roof and chimney outlines. Did Dad ever see Mum passing by in those days?
Ultimately they meet further up Little Bourke Street at the Chinese Presbyterian Church on the corner of Heffernan Lane, where signs encourage the public to Commit no Nuisance
Chinese Presbyterian church
Annie and David married. Two decades later their son, thehobartchinaman, married at the Chinese Presbyterian Church. Our wedding party walked down the street for the wedding banquet at Kun Ming. Dad didn’t cook, he was dead.
Dad had loved cooking, especially for the extended family. He was at its centre. One of nine siblings, he a lower middling child. In the skeptic’s kaddish #, about an aunt’s cancer, these words struck me :
‘…….as she, more than anybody else, has always been at its center, holding us together.”
“…at its centre, holding us together..”
Dad passed half a century ago and with him, his centering of the family. Family get togethers are now no longer. They ceased with his death. Bi-decade get togethers are Ancestry type genealogical affairs. There’s nothing particularly Chinese about them.
For this prompt, choose a proverb or a pair of proverbs. Use them as you wish — as an epigraph or within the poem. Be serious or funny. You can use one of the proverbs below or choose one of your own. Yes, they are often clichés, but that gives you a challenge to make your poem original, right? Make certain you clearly state the proverb.
Anh Do, an Aussie comedian, rebrands self as a an on tv portraitist.
The portraits are revealed to all at the end of a half hour show.
Do discusses with his portrait sitters, their lives and times.
It made for comfy evening TV.
Seven yearly series of this format endeared him to many hearts from 2014.
An earlier tv entertainer, Rolf Harris used a house paint brush to produce art work under the full glare of tv cameras years earlier.
In neither case, was it all as it seemed.
Folk melted with the tales of Do’s Vietnamese distant Dad and supportive mum.
The refugee triumphant.
Favorable reception of a portrait of his Dad, at the 2014 Archibald, Australia’s premier portrait prize seems to have provided an on ramp for Do’s increasing celebrity. 2014 was also the year of Rolf’s jailing for matters unrelated to portrait painting.
Looks like Anh was underdone though.
His painting tutor, has acknowledged his role in assisting to tart up Do’s onscreen work.
Oh Lordy, such feet of clay.
Note to Reader:
thehobartchinaman always resists the opportunity to rehash what’s better written elsewhere and below is a fuller expose of Mr Do.
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”—
To give jewels to a donkey is as stupid as giving a eunuch to a woman
Indian Proverb
My mouth dropped opened, but out it came,
Tried inhaling it back, it seemed quite lame.
“Stupidity begins with honesty,“
My thoughts lacked any viscosity.
“Better a stupid wife than a mess at home“
Inadvertently I’d said this on my phone,
My companion said” You can’t say that!”
If so, then quietly to your cat.
To give jewels to a donkey or so they say
values its work for domestic pay.
but it is as stupid as giving a eunuch to a woman.
An Indian proverb, quoted by Alfred E Nuemann
Thanks to ben alexander at the skeptic’s kaddish for the prompt below
d’Verse poetics
Prompt: The Proverbial
For this prompt, choose a proverb or a pair of proverbs. Use them as you wish — as an epigraph or within the poem. Be serious or funny. You can use one of the proverbs below or choose one of your own. Yes, they are often clichés, but that gives you a challenge to make your poem original, right? Make certain you clearly state the proverb.
Proverbs
Many hands make light work.
Too many cooks spoil the broth
Birds of a feather flock together.
Opposites attract.
You are never too old to learn.
You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
A rolling stone gathers no moss.
Stop and smell the roses.
He who hesitates is lost.
Strike while the iron is hot.
Look before you leap.
I apologize for going off-piste with Togolese, Indian and Japanese Proverbs.
Make certain you clearly state the proverb.
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