Thirty years from Tiananmen

Ti-Anna, Tiananmen Square
Fatherless, freedom-less
Our lives are not massacres
They are privileges

For whatever language we speak
We know the pain of loss and
The burden of duty, calling us, in a thousand ways
I, don’t have the heart to understand

Some things, about this divided world
That rules in treachery, in forfeit, in slavery
We are the children of a mile end of destiny
It reaches out to us, like the warm mist

Of Taiwan, or the valleys of farmlands of China
But we are not those places anymore
We have defined geography and hope
In new ways, with humility and the burden

We are not fanatics, who can be
Absent from our own families
We still must live, we still must love
Not only an ideal or a place or a privilege
But ourselves, the way that makes us most human.

 

http://www.cbc.ca/firsthand/episodes/inside-these-walls