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Even the Sadness Has Grown Up
So many years have passed,even the deaths from that time have grown up—have aged so much that even their obituariescould have given birth to children by now.Part of me remains in that year,but even that part has grown up.It has grown into a closely monitored email address.But it has also learned how to climb fences,to leaf through the pages of past injustices.
The passionate trumpet calls have never been muffled.Their sound is sustained, woven into fresh wreaths,but too faint to raise doubts about what’s real:Why is everyone in the world—black and white—drinking a toast and cheering under neon lights?When I walk outsidewhy do I always encounter in the squarea person named The Forgottenreciting a refrain called The Future?
2014 [End Page 180]
Yan Li was born in Beijing. He is a painter, poet, fiction writer, and essayist. In the mid-1980s, he moved to New York, where he started a magazine publishing experimental poets from China. He was a member of the avant-garde group of visual artists called The Stars and was associated with the Misty Poets. He has published numerous collections of poetry and the novel Meet with 9-11 (2002).
