From Sham to Shame - 2/11/07

Liu Minghe Speaks
On September 9, 2001, The New York Times featured a front page article describing the plight of people in China incarcerated under dubious circumstances as a result of China's "strike hard" campaign continued through 2003. One of those wrongfully convicted to face death, but finally released after lengthy appeals—thanks, in large part, to his former party connections—was Lui Minghe. His story inspired this poem.
This poem first appeared in The Journal, Spring/Summer 2003
Francisco Aragón
© 2007

A hyena upon an animal still breathing, he questioned me
I was told it would last for days
His voice clutched my frozen heart
My lungs burned my temples throbbed—night revolving my eyes
A silent tribe of spiders began spinning a web in my brain
Bells occasionally howled—homeless spirits endlessly moaning
I was handcuffed to a window, so I stood, or hung from my wrists
Several of my lower teeth left me during my visit
To open, with a withered hand, the lid of a coffin, and climb inside

At first, I didn't butter my hair
I breakfasted on air, on rock, on coal, on iron
My clothes were rotting rags, my bread soggy with rain
I ate by lowering my head into a bowl
I ate fever with my watery vegetables
For sixteen months my hands and feet were shackled
I slept on boards, or on the ground—a book
Les Poètes Maudis my pillow, my only companion
My skin was ravaged with mud, my armpits full of worms

Enormous province whose sky is flecked with fire and mud
Weighing on me like a lid
Pouring down days as dark as nights
Sometimes the rain mimicked the bars
Funeral processions—no drums, no music—filed slowly inside me
Hope wept, stabbing its stalk in my skull
Sometimes I saw in the sky endless beaches
I tried to invent new flowers, new tongues, new stars
Fear and suffering evaporating in the air
The hallucination of words

On my hospital bed that smell comes back to me still
I have dyed my hair black to erase those years