Thanks, everyone, for that.
And thanks to the Poetry Center for having me here.
It's great to be reading here with Katherine,
who has basically been living the life that I
would have dreamed of living if I was any good at science.
I've only spoken with her today, but I'm
waiting for the memoirs.
I thought I'd opened with a poem by Liu Xiaobo
that I translated in this book called June 4th Elegies,
and it's coming out later this spring.
And I don't know if you know about Liu Xiaobo.
He won the Nobel Peace Prize not this last time,
but the year before.
He was imprisoned for 11 years and he's still
serving that sentence.
I think he's in his third year.
So this is a poem from this book that he's
been writing, a poem or a series of poems around June
for 20 years now and he put them together in this book,
commemorating those who lost their lives in Tiananmen
in '89.
So this is from a series of poems
called "Experiencing Death."
I'd imagine being there beneath sunlight
with the procession of martyrs using just the one thin bone
to uphold a true conviction.
And yet, the heavenly void will not
place to sacrificed in gold.
A pack of wolves, well-fed, full of corpses,
celebrate in the warm new air, aflood with joy.
Faraway place, I've exiled my life to,
this place without sun, to flee the era of Christ's birth.
I cannot face the blinding vision of the cross.
From a wisp of smoke to a little heap of ash,
I've drained the drink of the martyrs,
since spring's about to break into the Brocade brilliance
of myriad flowers.
Deep in the night, empty road, I'm biking home.
I stop at a cigarette stand.
A car follows me, crashes over my bicycle.
Some enormous brute sees me.
I'm handcuffed, eyes covered, mouth
gagged, thrown into a prison van heading nowhere.
A blink, a trembling instant passes to a flash of awareness.
I'm still alive.
On Central Television News, my name
is changed to Arrested Black Hand.
Though those nameless white bones of the dead
still stand in the forgetting, I'm lifted up, high up,
I think self-invented lie.
Tell everyone how I've experienced death
so that Black Hand becomes a hero's medal of honor.
Even if I know death is a mysterious unknown,
being alive, there's no way to experience death.
And once dead, cannot experience death again.
Yet I'm still hovering within death.
A hovering and drowning.
Countless nights behind iron barred
windows and the graves beneath starlight
have exposed my nightmares.
Besides a lie, I own nothing.