WEBVTT

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Thanks, everyone, for that.

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And thanks to the Poetry
Center for having me here.

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It's great to be reading
here with Katherine,

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who has basically been
living the life that I

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would have dreamed of living
if I was any good at science.

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I've only spoken with
her today, but I'm

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waiting for the memoirs.

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I thought I'd opened
with a poem by Liu Xiaobo

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that I translated in this
book called June 4th Elegies,

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and it's coming out
later this spring.

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And I don't know if you
know about Liu Xiaobo.

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He won the Nobel Peace
Prize not this last time,

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but the year before.

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He was imprisoned for
11 years and he's still

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serving that sentence.

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I think he's in his third year.

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So this is a poem from
this book that he's

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been writing, a poem or a
series of poems around June

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for 20 years now and he put
them together in this book,

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commemorating those who lost
their lives in Tiananmen

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in '89.

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So this is from
a series of poems

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called "Experiencing Death."

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I'd imagine being
there beneath sunlight

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with the procession of martyrs
using just the one thin bone

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to uphold a true conviction.

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And yet, the heavenly
void will not

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place to sacrificed in gold.

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A pack of wolves,
well-fed, full of corpses,

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celebrate in the warm
new air, aflood with joy.

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Faraway place, I've
exiled my life to,

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this place without sun, to
flee the era of Christ's birth.

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I cannot face the blinding
vision of the cross.

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From a wisp of smoke to
a little heap of ash,

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I've drained the
drink of the martyrs,

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since spring's about to break
into the Brocade brilliance

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of myriad flowers.

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Deep in the night, empty
road, I'm biking home.

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I stop at a cigarette stand.

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A car follows me,
crashes over my bicycle.

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Some enormous brute sees me.

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I'm handcuffed,
eyes covered, mouth

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gagged, thrown into a
prison van heading nowhere.

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A blink, a trembling instant
passes to a flash of awareness.

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I'm still alive.

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On Central Television
News, my name

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is changed to
Arrested Black Hand.

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Though those nameless
white bones of the dead

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still stand in the forgetting,
I'm lifted up, high up,

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I think self-invented lie.

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Tell everyone how
I've experienced death

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so that Black Hand becomes
a hero's medal of honor.

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Even if I know death is
a mysterious unknown,

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being alive, there's no
way to experience death.

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And once dead, cannot
experience death again.

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Yet I'm still
hovering within death.

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A hovering and drowning.

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Countless nights
behind iron barred

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windows and the graves
beneath starlight

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have exposed my nightmares.

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Besides a lie, I own nothing.

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