The Compass and the Kite (Zheng He)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You were captured
at ten
and castrated
and given
to a prince
and the prince
became emperor
and the servant
became admiral
of the largest fleet
the world
had ever seen
and the distance
between servant
and admiral
had the thick
salt-lacquer taste
of a promotion
that travels
through the body
before it reaches
the rank.

[Verse 2]
The flagship
was four hundred feet long
in fourteen oh five
which is eighty years
before Columbus
crossed the Atlantic
in a boat
you could have stored
in the flagship's hold
and not noticed
and the hold
smelled like
camphor
and raw teak
and the particular
warm patience
of a man
whose hypothalamus
was cut
at ten
and whose ambition
rerouted itself
through the only
channels
the body
had left open.

[Chorus]
You were
a Muslim eunuch
commanding
the largest navy
on the planet
for a Buddhist emperor
in a Confucian court
and every part
of that sentence
was supposed to be
impossible
and you sailed
the sentence
around the Indian Ocean
seven times
and brought back
giraffes
for the emperor
because the emperor
wanted giraffes
and you were
the kind of admiral
who delivers
a giraffe
across an ocean
alive
and grinning.

[Outro]
The next emperor
burned the fleet.
The mandarins
destroyed the maps
because the idea
that a castrated
Muslim servant boy
had built
the greatest navy
in history
was a sentence
the Confucian court
preferred
not to have
on file
and the porcelain
your fleet
left behind
on the coast
of East Africa
is still there
and the porcelain
has never needed
a file
to prove
where it came from.

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