LeeAnne Lavender is an international educator and poet living in Shanghai. She is Canadian, and has made Shanghai her home for six years. She has also lived in Kenya and South Korea, and is spending more and more time writing, immersed in the beauty of words. 

 

Shanghai Moment

There’s a spot on the Huangpu path

where music floats to the sun.

A trumpet croons, alto tones

rich and burnished with

the city’s pulse.

 

An old man sits nearby,

staring at the river,

his foot tapping to the music

in the most imperceptible of ways.

 

He comes every morning

to this cathedral of sound,

proffering his prayers to the river gods.