Magnolia

Magnolia blooms, in not yet warmed chilling air of early spring, look gruesome rather than beauteous because the flowers open in lots of large corollas with a shade of pink and scarlet in milky white based petals resemble to the ginggue* actress Dan’s make-up, she wears heavy red eye shadow on thickly painted white make-up and always ends with tragic end, because the flowers on the leafless brownish-black withered branches look much too similar to the head of Medusa sculpt on smooth but cold marble, the large grotesque pupilless eyes with hairs of ill-willed wiggling serpents. When the sunlight appears momentarily through thick and heavy gloomy air, the blooms of neither white nor scarlet fall on the ground and shatter to pieces of petals that will never be able to come together again in the gathering darkness of dismal weather that is neither a winter nor the summer, the magnolia, though there is a shape, like a lifeless artificial flower, for unable to give off the fine scents, sobs. And when magnolia sobs, the spirit of deserted woman roaming in the nether world sighs her miserable life, and when her grief piles up high, the spirits of fallen corollas return to the withered branches and shoot out as the green leaves. *Ginggue: The Chinese traditional pantomimic-opera like drama developed and greatly flourished at Beijing in Qing dynasty.