These are from a work of the legendary Tang poet, Li Bo (b.701-d.762 AD; sometimes written as Li Bai; in Japan known as Li Haku).
The lines (from left to right) read somewhat like this:
"While I was as little a girl child as my hair barely reached my forehead,
And used to play on the ground in front with torn-off flower twigs,
You, my dear, used to come to me mounted on a pair of stilts,
And used to show off to me on my bed yet green unripe plums."
Scholars are in the opinion that this rather long piece of verses, of which you are viewing only the beginning four lines, was done while Li Bo was in a southern mercantile town near today's Nanjing.
There Li Bo was watching a working man who had come a long way from north, sweating from his hard labor.
To Li Bo's mind came his beloved, now growing old, woman's image whom he had had to leave back for a long long time.
The verses end with the woman's monologue: "Never be worried, dearest; you are ever with me in your every detail; and I am ready to fly to you, if it takes thousands of miles to cross." ...An inspiring love song!
You might be reminded of Edvard Grieg's work "Peer Gynt", too. Only Li Bo's is more than a millennium earlier.
Playing bamboo stilts is among the most favorite of Chinese as well as Japanese children. Maybe in Korea too. If you are reading this in Korea, please give information to the address below.
Also, if you are reading this outside of Asia, e-mail information will be welcome concerning whether playing stilts is (or was) almost exclusively for children. Bamboo stilts are very light in weight.
The author of this URL was naturally very good at it. If he still is or not is uncertain. But it will come back to him quick, probably.
The above right is a transplanting into Japanese of the lines, sharing many characters in common.
Bamboo stilts appear in a Chinese literature more than two millennia ago. Since then, as very well known in Japan too, a "stilts' friend" (or "Chikuba No Tomo" in Japanese) meant a friend since one's childhood.
Li Bo meticulously extended this friendship to that of a loving couple.
Please allow a few more words. The author of this URL does not know whether this piece of Li Bo's is translated and made public in non-Asian countries.
But he has made these lines into a ".gif" format file of some 19 Kbytes, wishing you can experience what the original characters look like.
You may feel free to download it; and the Japanese transplanting of 15 Kbytes.
He is looking very eagerly forward to the day the world can finally have a well-concerted uniform computer character set, unicode or whatever.