Grief And Other Poems
“To stay alive, is a true miracle .” Shi Tao, a journalist, writer and poet, was sentenced to imprisonment for 10 years in 2005 for releasing a document of the Communist Party to an overseas Chinese democracy site after Yahoo! China provided his personal details to the Chinese government.
Photo: Vijendra Singh/Unsplash
Grief
I forget all languages
to start with a simplest word
memory is like a lamp in a slave’s hands
I am kneeing down before it to beg it everlasting
the dark night is approaching inch by inch
I have to make a living before daybreak
no message about ships anchored at piers
only a type of sea breeze blowing to my face
its taste is called
grief
Poetry
I, with my senile hand,
write down the sufferings:
gun in ears
salt in spit
and
gold upon hair
Afternoon, My Afternoon
afternoon, my afternoon
my own afternoon alone
I was smoking, and drinking tea
hands were dancing
the whole face was
an empty
stage
with blood colour
Song of the World
the fat head
of a strawberry is filled with
dreams of colourful clouds
(men stuffed in
a dreaming scene of Salvador Dali)
a book about Egyptian deceased souls
characters in the book
still have warmth on their skins
(I stretched out one withered finger
to touch my iced face)
oh, this world
it is full of enemies of the dead
and Song of the World chanted by enemies
Bad News
wheels torn to shreds
were parking
at the silent night
bad news
like cold spell, carelessly
kept away from body warmth
from cancer wards to
my ears
so many eyes
were making the same hint
what’s been spoken, is merely
”speaking”, a shell in mirror
To stay alive, is a true miracle
Evening’s Coming
eyes are the guests of evening.
food left dining table
to participate in a walking game
thoughts of snow-geese
lost in a spacious stomach somewhere else
dark night was reproducing dark lives
Reading
whose sights
cast farther
than bats in dark night?
whose life
is more broad and straight
than a ladybug covered with stains?
whose sufferings
are more hopeless
than a lonely pine tree at hill top?
crows at the altar are driven out of cemetery of the night
Freedom
that voice is right in my mouth
in my stomach
among the food undigested last night
between the fingers
putting into throat to cause vomits
in the sink
disgusting with mouth cleaning
in the abyss of a pipe stretching to
far away, in a pond by accident
leaked out
in the cruel palms of hungry
wild geese, in the whirls flying up the sky
but encounter cold current
in hard stone-crevices colliding with cliffs
in a warm nest somewhere else
with moisture of saliva, once again
slide into smooth stomach
in a clot of bird droppings flying over fields and villages
flying over cross-country cars on freeway
in the square, air-dried, bringing protestors in
along with rolling traffic
within the speech, plugged with power, shocked and
amplified---
its name is freedom
---from “Letters to the Dead Souls”
April 8-11, 2004, Taiyuan
Original texts in Chinese can be found here.
(Translated by CHEN Biao)
Photo: Pierre Bamin/Unsplash