After You Left

I received in my gmail inbox a very special present today. A dear friend Lisheng (we call him Lish, or in my case, a very 标准 - 理圣 li3 sheng4) wrote me a poem for my birthday. It's beautiful and amazing and very humbling for me: "How can a human orchestrate such words so brilliantly?"

After You Left

After you left us, though but for a season,

We noticed that the sky had lost its colours -

All that was left was blue. You took with you

The pink and gold from out of sunset's frame;

And suddenly, the autumn leaves were blander,

The winter conversations dithered in your absence,

The songs of springtime lacked your novel harmony,

And long summer nights lengthened in slow silence.

Still we remember, we who stayed behind,

The way we were and how things used to be -

We read your musings in a far-off country,

And hear your steps in aged learning's halls.

In each memorial bit of you, we discover

Your potent humour always brings us laughter,

Your careful thoughts will always give us pause,

And cause for both reflection and rejoicing.

Who can forget your voice? As with a shout,

A whisper, or a word of piercing clarity,

You expressed an infinitude of meaning

In a pinprick moment of prescient totality.

Or with a song, your unique composition,

You gave our feelings flight on music's wings;

Or when, in torrent of tinkling lucidity, your argument

Negotiated with finesse the rapids of good sense.

For I am one who has felt both flight and torrent,

I thank you, who were God's instrument to me in both.

He used you for my piercing and my comforting;

After you left, I missed those gifts the most.

And so today I return these humble prayers for you:

To be a voice, which shouts God's name (as you desire):

Preparing His way, to proud hills and lowly valleys alike,

And people like me, the way you've always done

-- Tan Lisheng

Lisheng and I didn't always see eye-to-eye. We were classmates in Sec 3 and 4 (in his own words he thought of me as a "rival" -- for no reason I think, cos he was definitely my academic superior) and later went on to Cambridge together where I somehow stumbled into the CG he was in. As time went by, I grew much fonder of him (I think I can say very truthfully I didn't really like him when I first knew him, and when we were first in Cambridge) and I believe it was by God's grace that he morphed into this thoughtful person that he is now. He still often lives in his own conceptual dimensions which very few others can fathom (me included), but at least he's willing to admit that that much is true. Most of all, he's a very faithful brother in Christ who's always there to clear up our doubts about theology and his propensity to quote Paul Bunyan's Pilgrim Progress and C S Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia (and from any of the seven in the series) at length and with ease still amazes me.

Thanks Lish, for your generous love that shone through in the poem and in the fact that you remembered my birthday. Be God-blessed, God-watched, and God-favoured as your days in Cambridge belt out the final refrains of your swan song(s) there.