September 6, 2024 - “East Land” by Wedge Tai
Confucius said, “The wise are not troubled, the benevolent not worried, and the courageous not afraid.”
---The Analects
For millennia, your ancestors, your fathers
and you, have grazed and mated on this land,
and finally wormed into the brown earth,
never wondering what laurels above taste like.
A whip, like a ferocious hissing viper,
repeatedly bites into your backs.
Drenched with blood, you have always thought
that even snakes will be fed full one day.
When one of you was chosen as the Sacrifice,
the others quickly huddled into a roll of toilet paper,
watching a crimson snake winding on the ground,
extolling the sharpness of the butcher knife.
Later, a violent red storm swept away
all the footprints of your forefathers.
Ecstatic, you bid farewell to the past, only to find,
the next day, the sun was still that same sun.
The whip had been burned into ashes; its crack
still kept cloning itself over your head.
It worries your gaunt body during the day,
and at night, it gnaws your inescapable dream.
Those ancient ideograms were castrated
by the bloodthirsty sickle; those yew-scented
totems were dismantled. Thereafter,
you could only survive as a eunuch.
Some of your family and friends, a decade later,
were eaten by wolves in the northernmost
world of ice and snow, some evaporated
in Tarim Basin, and some even lurked within.
Window opened, the air you’ve never breathed
and the views you have never seen
all poured in. You began to look beyond the hill,
and dream of the clouds floating over the crest.
Indeed, you ought to learn the lion’s defiance
and courage, but must decline the poppies
it presents. Go deep into the hearts of
the sages, and nurture your mind into a gingko.
It is time, that you burnished your heart
of raw stone into nephrite. Let your feet
grow claws like daggers, and make your head
shoot out long horns as spears.
“East Land” is a poem from the author’s collection 2510, which we will be featured on Curlew Daily over the next week.
Wedge Tai is a Chinese underground poet living in Beijing. Born in the 1980s and currently working as an English teacher, he writes poems in Chinese and in English that reflect dire political realities and the resistance thereto in the communist regime, and thus hardly gets published in mainstream press. He is the author of the self-printed collection, Disgrace Disclaimer.
