Tapoti
Summer
1933
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Red, orange, yellow, green,
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blue, violet, indigo:
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Who is dancing with these
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rainbow colours in the sky?
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Air after rain, slanting sun:
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mountains and passes turning blue
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in each changing moment.
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Fierce battles that year:
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bullet holes in village walls.
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These mountains so decorated,
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look even more beautiful today.
NOTES
Tapoti is a town seventeen
miles northwest of Juichin in Kiangsi Province, the main Red base. Tapoti is
said to be a colourful place, with high mounds of red clay and green pine
woods. Rice paddies and farmhouses with grey tile roofs and white walls add
their colours. Willows line the streams. After rain, there are rainbows in the
sky with as many colours as the landscape.
‘Fierce battles that year’
probably refers to the fighting in February 1929 in which the Red Army lost
heavily but captured hundreds of Nationalist troops and rifles.
The poem repeats one of
Mao’s favourite situations — a landscape beautiful in itself, made
more attractive by Red Army victory and the presence of Communist soldiers and
flags, adding their own colours (including blood) to those of the town and
country. —Transcriber, MIA
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