Description Of A Scene Poem by royness ( ' ' )

In search of his mother, Zushio
edges over the shoreline.
He crosses between two trees,
steps barefoot over the stones.
Ambient noise: recordings of the wind
and moving tide. He has come as a beggar.
The camera tracks
crablike, alongside him.

Mother
sits hunched over her legs.
Her hair is matted and grey.
She beats on the sand with a stick
and her voice
is carried in song:

“Zushio, how I long for you.
Isn’t life torture? ”

Zushio approaches –
He has climbed mountains to find her,
escaped from slavedom, relinquished
his title of governor.
He has seen men branded
and on command,
he too has branded men.

The gentle, subtle strings
hint at a resolution, sing possibilities. Zushio
leans down onto his knees.

But she cannot believe it is him –
The bailiffs have put out her eyes.
She grieves for her husband,
for Anju, her daughter (who sleeps
beneath the lake) and Zushio –
the son she does not recognise –
who weeps on the beach beside her.

The waves rise and fall,
closer now,
as though the water will cover them all...

“You wretched being.
You’ve come to try and fool me again.”

And yet, there is hope –
The camera moves slowly into close up.
Zushio reveals the amulet (a statue
of the goddess of mercy
entrusted to him by his father) .
Mother studies the Kwannon with her hands,
Tracing out the lines of a memory:

“Forgive you my son?
I don’t know what it is you have done.”

The camera pulls back as they embrace, tilts up –
The angle reveals a vast seascape. Sand
stretches into desert. An old sea-weed gatherer
combs the beach, dragging thick tangles of weed
across the shore. At the edge of the frame, twin shadows –
(two cliffs cut into the picture) .
In the distance, in the space
In between, (and here, the image
begins to fade) the sky merges into the sea.