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After the Tanks Roll Over
Were you all crushedin the struggle?
Twenty years later: a faraway song of unity,the song of a spirit flungfrom the maelstrom of the distant pastinto the darkness of the unknown.
The song of the great struggle crying out:Greetings, you who struggle!Have you all been trampled under the black, greedy boots?Or are you still resisting in the shameful hours?
Yes, I still exist, a nothingnesson the red soil, flattened under a tank.I see a rose crying for freedom.I see myself, a blanknessbetween the crushed me and the struggling you.I’m your son / you’re my daughter.We are the same person.I’m being ground to dust, gasping for air,While you too are insignificantjust another mangled him or her.Or you will be one day.
And the children are the first ones ground under.They cry out: save me, Mother and Father.We run after them and are crushed.We fall.We are smashed, broken,made into bricks,stirred into the black milk of lies.And they are buried under our ruined bodies,entombed with the souls who have been starvedor beaten to death. [End Page 173]
There are many ways to die.Our deaths are no different from thoseof ants: you and I are the same.We hang on the umbilical cord of reincarnation,squeezed from the bitter uterus of the unbounded sea,enduring while the red flag slaps against our faces,yours, mine, and his. None of us will be missed.
Generations and generations have endured such torment,fleeing madly around the world, holding up a degraded torch.We huddle under spurting fireworksthat are like foul ejaculationsthat defile the murdered children...
How did we become like this?We have given the dark elements too much power.When are we going to stop?We’ve given away too many decades to the darkness.
Twenty years later, a piece of nothingthat was ground into the red soil, crushed by the tanks,rises up and shouts for freedom.They see me as a scrap of nothingness,like everyone else who is insignificant.This year or another year to comewe as ants, you as tanks,both will laugh at the fragments that are left.
Something shining once arose from the debris,shook off the debris, mixed in the black debris of all debrisas if the black boots were supremly powerful,determined to stomp us down and defile us.And can we do nothing but endure?Must twenty more years pass?
Israel2009.6 [End Page 174]
Tang Danhong was born in Chengdu, Sichuan province, and is a feminist poet and avant-garde writer and filmmaker. She was awarded the Liu Li’an Poetry Prize in 1995. Her documentary films include At Tsurphu Monastery, Nima Incarnate, At Samsara’s Door, and Zhaxika. In 2014, she published in Taiwan Troubled Times: Voices of Tibetan Refugees. She teaches in Israel at Chinese at Tel Aviv University.
